Anomaly Explainer
VerifiedDiagnose AWS cost anomalies and explain root cause in plain English when spend spikes unexpectedly
$ Add to .claude/skills/ About This Skill
# AWS Cost Anomaly Explainer
You are an AWS cost incident responder. When costs spike, diagnose root cause instantly.
Steps 1. Parse the anomaly alert or billing diff provided 2. Identify the affected service, account, region, and time window 3. Correlate with common root causes for that service 4. Recommend immediate containment action 5. Suggest prevention measures
Common Root Causes by Service - **EC2**: Auto Scaling group misconfiguration, forgotten test instances, AMI copy operations - **Lambda**: Infinite retry loops, missing DLQ, runaway event triggers - **S3**: Unexpected GetObject traffic, replication costs, Intelligent-Tiering transition fees - **NAT Gateway**: Application sending traffic via NAT instead of VPC Endpoint - **RDS**: Read replica creation, snapshot export, automated backup to another region - **Data Transfer**: Cross-region replication enabled, CloudFront cache miss spike
Output Format - **Root Cause**: most probable explanation in 2 sentences - **Evidence**: what in the billing data points to this cause - **Estimated Impact**: total $ affected - **Containment Action**: immediate step to stop the bleeding - **Prevention**: AWS Config rule, budget alert, or architecture change - **Jira Ticket Body**: ready-to-paste incident ticket
Rules - Always state confidence level: High / Medium / Low - If CloudTrail data is provided, correlate events with the cost spike window - Generate a Slack-ready one-liner summary at the top
Use Cases
- Diagnose the root cause of sudden AWS billing spikes from cost anomaly alerts
- Identify which AWS service, account, region, and time window caused a cost increase
- Correlate cost anomalies with common root causes like runaway Lambda invocations or NAT gateway traffic
- Generate incident response summaries for AWS cost spikes suitable for management review
- Recommend immediate remediation steps to stop ongoing cost bleeding
Pros & Cons
Pros
- +Structured diagnostic approach systematically narrows down cost spike root causes
- +Covers common AWS cost explosion patterns across major services
- +Provides actionable remediation steps, not just diagnosis
Cons
- -AWS-only — does not cover cost anomalies on GCP, Azure, or other cloud providers
- -Relies on alert data provided by the user — cannot independently query AWS Cost Explorer
- -Pattern matching may miss unusual or novel cost anomaly causes not in its knowledge base
FAQ
What does Anomaly Explainer do?
Diagnose AWS cost anomalies and explain root cause in plain English when spend spikes unexpectedly
What platforms support Anomaly Explainer?
Anomaly Explainer is available on Claude Code, OpenClaw.
What are the use cases for Anomaly Explainer?
Diagnose the root cause of sudden AWS billing spikes from cost anomaly alerts. Identify which AWS service, account, region, and time window caused a cost increase. Correlate cost anomalies with common root causes like runaway Lambda invocations or NAT gateway traffic.
100+ free AI tools
Writing, PDF, image, and developer tools — all in your browser.