M4.6 module quiz
Ten questions. 80% to pass (8 of 10). Open book, unlimited retakes.
Answers are collapsed under each question. Answer first, then check.
Q1
Budget spend is:
A. Stored in a column and refreshed by a nightly cron
B. Snapshotted daily and served from that snapshot
C. Computed live from cost records on every read
D. Supplied by the cloud provider’s own budget API
Show answer
Correct: C. There is no stored spend column anywhere, so there is nothing to keep in sync and nothing to drift. Threshold notifications still fire from the cron, which reads spend live rather than writing it back.
Q2
A budget can be scoped to:
A. Teams only, since a team is the thing that owns each budget
B. A cloud account, a resource, a resource group, or an AI provider
C. An organisation only, with no sub-scopes of any kind
D. A tag key and value, so that any axis at all can be limited
Show answer
Correct: B. Resolved through a polymorphic scope pair; the AI provider scope covers AI Gateway spend. Multiple budgets can sit on the same underlying data independently, which is what makes a composite hierarchy possible.
Q3
Budgets do not auto-enforce because:
A. The workload causing an overrun is usually the one you least want stopped without a human deciding
B. The API does not support stopping a resource from inside a budget evaluation context at all
C. It would violate SOC 2, which requires human approval
D. Enforcement is planned for a later release of budgets
Show answer
Correct: A. A budget is a conversation trigger. Enforcement is a separate decision with its own escalation path, and auto-enforcement is rarely the right answer.
Q4
The traffic-light signals mean:
A. Green under 50%, yellow between 50 and 90%, red above
B. Green on track, yellow at threshold, red over budget
C. Green approved, yellow pending, red rejected
D. Green actual, yellow forecast, red variance
Show answer
Correct: B. The threshold is configurable per budget, so yellow is defined by the org rather than by a fixed percentage.
Q5
Budget, forecast and alert are:
A. Three views of one underlying number
B. Sequential stages of the same allocation process
C. Provider-specific terms for one thing
D. Three separate concepts to design independently
Show answer
Correct: D. A budget is a target, a forecast is a projection, an alert is a trigger. Conflating them produces a budget that moves whenever the forecast does, which defeats the point of having one.
Q6
A channel is subscribed to budget alerts. It receives a budget warning on May 18, and spend stays above the threshold on May 19. On May 19 the channel:
A. Hears nothing more until the exceeded alert fires
B. Receives the warning again on that day’s run
C. Receives one reminder a week while the level holds
D. Hears nothing more until next month
Show answer
Correct: B. Subscribed channels get the alert on every daily run while the level holds. Only the email fallback to org admins, used when no channel is subscribed, sends once per level per month.
Q7
A $100/month budget where month-to-month variance is normal. The best alert threshold is:
A. 50%
B. 75%
C. 90%
D. 0 (off), relying on the exceeded alert at 100%
Show answer
Correct: D. On a small budget, normal variance makes an early warning noise. The exceeded alert at 100% always fires and cannot be turned off, so it is enough.
Q8
To send a budget’s exceeded alert to a second audience, such as a FinOps channel, you:
A. Add a second threshold at 100%
B. Add a subscription for budget.exceeded on that channel
C. Create a duplicate budget with the same scope
D. Raise the warning threshold to 100%
Show answer
Correct: B. A budget has only two alert levels. Escalation comes from where each level is routed, not from more markers, so a second audience is a second subscription.
Q9
A composite budget hierarchy works because:
A. Budgets nest formally by scope
B. Multiple independent budgets can watch overlapping data
C. Child budgets roll up into the parent automatically
D. The provider enforces the org total
Show answer
Correct: B. An account-level budget and a group-level budget on overlapping resources are both valid and both fire on their own thresholds. Independence is the useful property.
Q10
AI provider budgets raise:
A. The same budget.warning and budget.exceeded events as cloud budgets
B. Their own event family, budget.ai_gateway.warning and budget.ai_gateway.critical
C. No alerts at all
D. Only an email to org admins
Show answer
Correct: B. AI provider budgets have their own events, so they can be routed separately from cloud budgets.
What’s next
Back to Budget governance.