AWS FinOps Agent (preview) FAQs

AWS FinOps Agent is a frontier agent that makes it easy for customers to continuously monitor costs, investigate anomalies, and surface optimization opportunities across their cloud environments.

AWS FinOps Agent helps your team move cloud financial management from reactive monthly reviews to scheduled, event-driven operations, in two ways: 

Investigate Cost Anomalies Faster than Ever Before: The faster your teams can investigate cost anomalies, the faster they can determine whether those anomalies reflect positive business signals, like growth in a new workload, or opportunities to optimize your environment. A Cost Anomaly Detection alert tells you something changed. AWS FinOps Agent takes the next step automatically: it correlates the cost change with AWS CloudTrail events, identifies the change that drove the spike, and produces an investigation summary with the likely root cause and the responsible owner. Optionally, the agent can deliver the findings by opening a Jira ticket or posting to a Slack channel, so the engineer who owns the resource gets the context and can decide what to do next. To focus the agent on what matters most, you can include a filter in your automation prompt, for example, only investigating anomalies above a specific dollar threshold, so your team's attention stays on the highest-impact changes. 

Put Cost Answers in the Hands of Every Engineer: AWS FinOps Agent lets engineers ask cost questions in natural language and get answers using your actual cost and usage data. An engineer can ask, "Why did my AWS cost go up last month?" and get a response that identifies the cost changes, the contributing services, and the underlying usage drivers. To tailor the agent to your organization, you can upload context files such as account-to-owner mappings, team definitions, tagging conventions, and review cadences. The agent can leverage this context to interpret questions in your organization's terms, for example resolving "What's the cost of Team X?" to the specific accounts that team owns. Engineers get answers at the moment they need them, and your FinOps team can spend that time on strategic work. 

AWS FinOps Agent is complementary to these services. The agent reads cost and usage data from AWS Cost Explorer, listens for cost anomaly events from AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, pulls optimization recommendations from AWS Cost Optimization Hub and AWS Compute Optimizer, and uses AWS CloudTrail to identify the change behind a cost anomaly.

AWS FinOps Agent integrates with Jira and Slack. You can prompt the agent to create Jira tickets for cost anomaly investigations and optimization recommendations so the engineering team picks up the work in the tool they already use. It can also post messages to Slack channels you choose, so engineers can see anomaly investigations, ask cost questions, and receive scheduled report deliveries inside Slack.

AWS FinOps Agent integrates with Jira through a Forge app that an administrator installs in your Jira workspace. After installing the app, you connect one or more Jira spaces to your Agent by configuring the Jira space keys in the connection setup. Once connected, the agent can create tickets in those space keys with the findings from anomaly investigations, summarized optimization recommendations, or the output of any task you run. 

AWS FinOps Agent can deliver notifications through Slack. An administrator installs the app and connects specific Slack channels to your Agent. Once connected, the agent can post anomaly investigation findings, scheduled reports, and other task output to those channels. Slack integration is delivery-only in the preview; engineers do not initiate conversations with the agent inside Slack today.

Yes. AWS FinOps Agent runs in the AWS Management Console. You create an Agent in your AWS account, and the agent uses IAM roles to access your cost and usage data.

Here's how to set it up: 

1. Create an agent. Sign in to the AWS Management Console, switch to the US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1) Region, open the AWS FinOps Agent Console page, and create your first agent. 
2. Complete the one-click IAM role setup. Provision the IAM role the agent uses to read your cost, usage, and operational data. 
3. Connect Jira and Slack (optional). Configure Jira space keys and Slack channels so the agent can create tickets and post messages. 
4. Confirm the agent is created. Review your agent configuration in the AWS FinOps Agent Console. 
5. Open the web application. From the AWS FinOps Agent Console page, open the agent's web application to start interacting with it. 
6. Upload your initial context (optional). In the web application, add an account-to-owner mapping and any organization-specific instructions (known exceptions, prioritization rules, review cadence). 
7. Run your first query. Ask in natural language, for example, "List the top 10 cost drivers across last month and group them by Region," or "Investigate any cost anomaly over $1,000 in the data platform accounts and open a Jira ticket with root causes." 
8. Set up your first event-triggered cost anomaly detection automation. Ask the agent to "listen for AWS Cost Anomaly Detection events, investigate each anomaly for root cause, and post the findings to the #finops-anomalies Slack channel." From that point on, anomalies are investigated and posted to the channel without manual triage. 

Management account administrators can create an Agent that manages cost and usage data across the entire organization. Member account owners can also create their own Agent scoped to their own account.

AWS FinOps Agent uses Amazon Bedrock foundation models.

AWS FinOps Agent read your cost and usage data from AWS services through IAM roles you configure. By default, the agent operates in read-only mode against AWS Billing and Cost Management products. The agent only takes write actions, such as creating a Jira ticket, when you have configured the corresponding integration and the agent is acting on a task you asked it to run.

Yes, all agent activities are automatically captured by AWS CloudTrail within the hosting AWS account. 

You can try AWS FinOps Agent today in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. The agent itself runs in US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), and it can manage costs across AWS Regions and accounts when set up in the management account. During the preview period, you can use AWS FinOps Agent at no charge, with a monthly usage limit. Standard charges apply for other AWS services used in connection with AWS FinOps Agent.