OverviewFinOps & Budget

Budget Management

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Alephant features a Three-Level Independent Budget System. This ensures that costs are controlled at every granularity without complex cascading rules. Each level evaluates usage independently and triggers actions when limits are reached.

1. Workspace Budget

  • Scope: The total spend across your entire organization.
  • Action: Can trigger alerts (e.g., “Notify me when total spend hits 80% of $5,000”).

2. Department Budget (Enterprise Only)

  • Scope: Total spend generated by all Members and Agents within a specific Department.
  • Actions: Can be set to pause_all (block requests), alert_only, or soft_throttle (reduce throughput) when the department limit is reached.

3. Virtual Key (VK) Budget

  • Scope: Spend generated by a single Virtual Key (tied to an individual Member or Agent).
  • Actions: Configurable to alert_only, disable_key, or block_requests.

Key Principle

The three levels do not cascade. A single Virtual Key might exhaust its micro-budget and be blocked, even while the Department and Workspace overall budgets are perfectly healthy.