AWS FinOps Agent Automates Investigation from Cost Anomaly Alerts to Root Cause

Automated Cost Anomaly Investigation

AWS FinOps Agent is a managed service that automatically investigates cost anomalies in running workloads. Previously, after receiving cost spike alerts, it took hours to days to manually analyze Cost Explorer and CloudTrail to find the cause, but this agent correlates Cost Anomaly Detection alerts with CloudTrail events to immediately identify the root cause and resource owner.

Key Features and Components

The agent provides four core features.

• Automated Cost Anomaly Investigation: Triggered upon anomaly detection, it delivers investigation summaries to Slack or Jira.
• Natural Language Cost Q&A: Answers questions based on actual cost data.
• Periodic Reports: Regularly generates reports in HTML, PDF, and PPT formats.
• Optimization Recommendation Summary: Aggregates recommendations from Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer into Jira tickets.

Setup and Operation

The Agent is hosted in the us-east-1 region and automatically creates IAM roles via a console wizard. To improve investigation quality, uploading an organizational context file that maps accounts and teams allows the agent to interpret cost data in the organization's language and route it accurately to the responsible parties.

Automation settings are created by entering natural language in a chat interface rather than a separate form. For example, you can configure it to post a summary to a specified Slack channel when a cost anomaly exceeding a certain amount is detected, internally provisioning EventBridge rules to perform event-based automation.