Add the cost of an incident to your postmortem
Incidents are logged as events. After each one, the agent reports what it cost: retries, autoscaling, failover traffic and extra LLM calls.
Runs in
Claude · Slack
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Add the cost of an incident to your postmortem
Question
What did the incident on Sep 18 between 14:00 and 19:00 cost us compared with a normal Thursday, by service?
Query
Result
Finding
Incident window (5h): +€3,700 vs a normal Thursday. Autoscaled api nodes +€1,900, cross-region failover transfer +€1,100, retried LLM calls +€700.
You decide
The incident owner adds the cost section to the postmortem.
Playbook
What the agent does
From what Costory notices to what you decide. Costory suggests the next step in conversation, and you decide whether to go ahead.
Costory notices
An incident is closed.
Costory investigates
01
Log the incident
Create an event from the API, CI/CD or chat with a start and end time.
02
Measure the delta
Compare cost in the incident window with a normal baseline.
03
Break it down
By service and team.
04
Add it to the doc
Claude drafts the cost section of the postmortem.
Where you see it
Claude
You decide
The incident owner adds the cost section to the postmortem.
Why it matters
Postmortems cover duration and customer impact, rarely cost. Yet incidents often cause the biggest one-off spikes of the month.
Who it’s for
SREs, incident commanders, engineering managers
Where it runs
Claude · Slack
What you get
What lands in front of your team
Cost in every postmortem
A number, not a guess.
A service breakdown
What scaled and why.
Better prioritization
Reliability work backed by cost.
Sources and assistants
What it connects
Data sources
Example prompts
Or drive it yourself
Measure
What did the incident on Sep 18 between 14:00 and 19:00 cost us compared with a normal Thursday, by service?
FAQ
Questions about this playbook
How fresh is the data?
Costory refreshes billing data every morning. Providers deliver billing exports with some delay, so a change usually shows up within a day or two.
How long does this playbook take to set up?
Connecting your billing data and the Costory MCP takes under 30 minutes with Terraform or CloudFormation. The playbook itself takes minutes: pick the scope, the trigger and the Slack channel. The first billing data lands the next day, and the agent starts from there.
Can we adjust what the agent does?
Yes. You choose the trigger, the scope (team, service, environment), the channel and the format, and you can pause or change it at any time.
Does Costory change anything in our cloud accounts?
No. Costory reads billing exports and the metrics you connect, and has no write access to your cloud. Actions it takes create Costory objects only: alerts, reports, dashboards and events. Your team stays in control of every change.
Step-by-step guide in the Costory docs
Related playbooks
Run these alongside it
Costory notices
Spend on a team, service or account deviates from its baseline.
Investigate a cost spike and find the deploy behind it
When spend moves, the agent finds the deploy, team and service behind it, checks incidents and provider events from the same window, and posts the likely cause.
See the playbook
Costory notices
A deploy is followed by a cost change on the same service.
Cost impact of every deploy, from GitHub events
Capture deploys, PR merges and releases from GitHub or your CI/CD pipeline, and see which ones changed cost.
See the playbook
Costory notices
An anomaly is detected, any time of day.
Investigate anomalies in a Slack thread with the FinOps agent
When an alert fires in #finops or a team channel, reply in the thread and the FinOps agent investigates: which team, which service, which deploy.
See the playbook
Put this playbook on call
Included in every plan, from €250/month. 30-day free trial: connect in under 30 minutes, get your first optimization recommendation the next day.
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Setup
About 30 minutes
Data residency
EU
Access
Read-only on your cloud