Route cost alerts to the owning team's channel
Each team gets its own alerts in its own Slack or Teams channel, scoped to the services it owns.
Runs in
Slack · Teams · Email
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
# finops
Costory
APP
Cost alert: Search daily spend €1,940 vs a €1,410 trailing 7-day average (+38%). Top driver: Elasticsearch data nodes. Reply in thread to investigate.
The owning team acts in its own channel.
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
A team's spend deviates from its baseline.
Costory investigates
01
Scope by team
Alerts use team scopes or dimension filters.
02
Pick destinations
list_available_destinations returns the Slack channels, Teams channels and emails you can use.
03
Backtest
Preview firing frequency before enabling.
04
Investigate in thread
Teams ask the FinOps agent why it fired.
Where you see it
Slack · #team-search
You decide
The owning team acts in its own channel.
Why it matters
A single #finops channel full of alerts becomes noise. Alerts work when the team that can fix the problem sees them.
Who it’s for
Platform leads, engineering managers
Where it runs
Slack · Teams · Email
What you get
What lands in front of your team
Signal, not noise
Alerts go to the team that owns the cost.
Consistent rules
The same alert logic for every team.
Investigate in place
Threads with the FinOps agent.
Sources and assistants
What it connects
Data sources
Example prompts
Or drive it yourself
Set up
Create a cost alert for each team that fires when its daily spend rises 30% above the trailing 7 days, sent to the team's own Slack channel.
Review
List all active cost alerts by destination channel and how often each fired last month.
FAQ
Questions about this playbook
Which agents and assistants work with Costory?
Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code with GitHub Copilot and Dust connect to the hosted Costory MCP server with OAuth.
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
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
Costory notices
A new alert is proposed, by you or by the agent.
Backtest a cost alert before it goes live
Preview how often an alert would have fired over the past weeks before turning it on, so alerts stay rare and useful.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Every Monday at 9:00, for each team.
Weekly showback per team, posted in each team's Slack channel
Every engineering team gets its own weekly cost report in its own Slack channel, scoped to the services it owns.
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