All alert and notification types

A comparison of every alert and notification in CostGlass, with channel setup and testing.

All alert and notification types

One table of everything CostGlass can tell you about, what triggers each message, where it goes and where to set it up.

Where in CostGlassPlan & Control → Alert Rules

PlanAll plans. Some channels need setup.

Who can do thisOwners and admins configure most alerts.

Time needed10 minutes

In short

CostGlass has several alert types because they answer different questions: unusual days, rises versus last period, budget limits, service outages and more.
Chat and paging channels are Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty and Jira. Email is available almost everywhere.
Test sends of email go only to you, so a test button can never be used to send mail to someone else.
Webhook addresses are checked against allow-lists and are never shown again after you save them.
Not every alert type supports every channel. Use the table below.

The Notifications settings page, where spend summaries and Jira are configured.

The comparison table

Alert	What triggers it	Channels	Who receives it	Where to set it up
Anomaly notifications (guide)	A scan finds an unusual day whose extra cost per day (dollars) or percentage is greater than a rule threshold. Scans run every 6 hours.	Email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Jira. Optional daily digest.	Whoever you list on each rule. If you have no rules, all active users get an email.	Anomalies page, Anomaly Notification Rules by Threshold.
Cost alerts (guide)	Spend in the last complete day, week, month or quarter rose versus the one before by a percentage or amount. Checked every 6 hours.	Email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Jira. No channel is allowed (recorded only).	Whoever you list. Email goes to active members of your organisation.	Cost Alerts page, New cost alert.
Budget alerts (guide)	A budget reaches 80% of its limit (spent or projected) or is exceeded. Raised when the Alert Rules page is loaded, once per budget.	Email to users; Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, email or Jira only if a budget rule exists with channels.	Active users in your organisation.	Budgets page for the budget itself. The alert history is on the Alert Rules page.
Alert Rules page	Shows budget and legacy anomaly alerts and the rules that route them. You can switch rules on or off, edit their channels, and test them.	Email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty (Jira on budget rules).	As configured on each rule.	Plan & Control, Alert Rules.
Uptime alerts	A monitored service check comes back degraded or down. The rule for the service's environment (for example prod) decides whether degraded or down alerts are on.	Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, email.	Whoever you list on the environment category or on the service.	Uptime page: category policies per environment, and per-service alert channels. See Uptime & incidents.
Unit economics target alerts (guide)	A metric's cost per unit goes more than 5% over its target. One message when it crosses, a reminder at most weekly while it stays over.	Email only.	Owners and admins.	Unit Economics page: set a target and turn alerts on for the metric.
Weekly spend summary	Sent on Mondays at 01:00 UTC. There is also a Monthly Executive Rollup option, off by default, sent on the 1st.	Email, Slack, Teams.	You choose on the page. It only reaches users who existed when the summary was due.	Settings, Notifications. See Notifications.
Issues (guide)	You are assigned to an issue, or an issue you follow gets a comment, is resolved or is reopened.	Email.	Assignees and subscribers, never the person who made the change.	Issues page. Use Subscribe to follow one.
Scheduled reports and views	A schedule you create on a saved Cost Explorer view or a saved report is due.	Email (with an attachment or a link) and Slack or Teams digest.	Active members of your organisation (within their access), or the chat channels you add.	The schedule dialog on saved views and reports.
DevOps request emails	A request is created, an engineer is assigned, or its status changes.	Email.	The HAMS engineers assigned to your organisation and operators are told of a new request; you get an acknowledgement and status updates.	DevOps, Requests.

Note

Alerts that depend on a schedule or scan cannot be instant. The 6-hour checks mean a message can arrive up to several hours after the underlying charge appears in your cloud.

Choosing the right alert

You want to know when	Use
One service cost far more than normal yesterday	Anomaly notification rules
Last week or last month was higher than the one before	Cost alerts
You are close to or over a spending limit	[object Object] (alerts appear on the Alert Rules page)
A website or API is down	Uptime alerts
Cost per customer, order or request is rising	Unit economics target alerts
A regular overview for managers	Weekly spend summary, or a scheduled report
A task to be owned and tracked	Issues

Tip

A sensible starting set: a weekly cost alert (percent, by service), one anomaly rule for large amounts to Slack or Teams, a budget per cloud, and the weekly summary to email.

Avoiding duplicates

One event can trigger several alert types, for example a large increase might be both an anomaly and a cost alert. If that is noisy, send anomalies to a chat channel and cost alerts to email, or raise the thresholds on one of them.

Setting up channels

Email

Enter one or more addresses where the channel asks for them (up to 10). Some alert types send to your organisation's active users instead. Email is sent from the CostGlass mail service.

Slack

Create an incoming webhook

In Slack, create an app with Incoming Webhooks and add it to the channel you want. Copy the webhook address.

Paste it into CostGlass

Choose Slack on the alert, enter a label such as the channel name, and paste the address into Webhook URL. It must start with https://hooks.slack.com/services/ (or the Slack government host).

Test

Click Test Channel. A real message appears in the channel. A placeholder address ending in three dots is rejected.

Microsoft Teams

Create a webhook or a Workflows (Power Automate) flow that posts to a channel and paste its address. CostGlass accepts addresses on *.webhook.office.com, outlook.office.com, *.logic.azure.com and *.api.powerplatform.com.

PagerDuty

Create an Events API v2 integration on a PagerDuty service and paste its 32-character integration key into Integration key (Events API v2). Anything that is not exactly 32 letters and digits is rejected.

Jira

Connect Jira once under Settings, Notifications, then choose Jira as a channel. No extra secret is needed on the alert. One Jira issue is created per event.

How secrets are kept

Webhook addresses and keys are write-only. After saving you see only the last four characters. To keep the saved value, leave the secret box empty when you edit. Anomaly and cost alert secrets are held in a secrets vault.

Why webhook hosts are restricted

CostGlass sends these messages from its servers. If any address were accepted, someone could point an alert at an internal address. That is why only Slack, Teams, PagerDuty and email targets are allowed, and redirects are not followed.

Testing safely

An email test always goes to you, the signed-in person, whatever addresses are saved. The result says who it was sent to.
Slack and Teams tests post a real message to the channel.
A PagerDuty test creates a real incident that pages on-call. Resolve it afterwards.
A Jira test creates a real, labelled test issue.
Only owners and admins can send tests.

The Alert Rules page in detail

The Alert Rules page has four cards at the top (Active Alerts, Budget Threshold Warnings, Notification Rules and Connected Channels), then Configured Notification Rules,Active FinOps Alerts (tabs All, Budget Alerts and Cost Anomalies) and Alert & Notification History.

Each rule has an on/off switch, a Channels button to edit where it goes, and a Test Alert button.
Press Ack on an active alert to acknowledge it.
Opening the page also checks your budgets, which is how budget alerts are raised.

Note

The page lets you edit and switch existing rules but does not have a button to create a new one. A new organisation therefore starts with no rules. For alerts you can set up yourself, use the anomaly notification rules and cost alerts, which have their own create buttons.

Frequently asked questions

Why did I get no alert when spend went up?

Check which alert type you expect: each has its own conditions. Cost alerts compare complete periods, anomalies need an unusual day, and budget alerts fire at 80% and 100%. Also check that the rule is enabled, has a channel and is not muted.

Can I send everything to one Slack channel?

Yes. Use the same webhook on each alert type. Anomaly rules, cost alerts and uptime categories each take their own channel list.

Why are some alert types email-only?

Unit economics target alerts, issues and the DevOps request emails are email-only today.

Can I stop alerts at night?

Anomaly rules have quiet hours and mute. The other types do not have quiet hours yet.

All Documentation Guides

Welcome to CostGlass — What CostGlass does, who it is for, how your data gets in, the plans and regions, and a plain-English glossary.
Quickstart: your first hour — Sign up, connect a first cloud, invite your team, set a budget and turn on anomaly alerts, with a first-week checklist.
Finding your way around — A tour of the sidebar, top bar and page controls: what every page answers, plan gating, currency, language, links and caching.
Dashboards — The Overview dashboard widget by widget, plus building custom dashboards you can share with your organisation.
Cloud Resources — The multi-cloud inventory: filters, search, categories, estimated cost, terminated resources and CSV or Excel export.
Uptime, incidents & support requests — Monitor public endpoints, route alerts, see incidents and raise requests to CostGlass engineers.
How CostGlass accesses your data — Security and data ingestion architecture: how CostGlass reads multi-cloud billing and telemetry through read-only roles and least-privilege permissions.
Dashboard & Platform Screenshot Tour — Visual walkthrough of the CostGlass interface with screenshots covering multi-cloud spend, Cost Explorer, anomalies, Kubernetes allocation, and savings.
Connecting your clouds: overview — Every cloud and service you can connect, how each one connects, what access it needs, how long data takes and your plan limits.
Connect AWS (CloudFormation) — Deploy the generated CloudFormation template, choose organization or single account and optional features, then verify.
Connect AWS with Terraform instead of CloudFormation — A Terraform equivalent of the generated AWS template, with an Organization variant and a way to compare it to the wizard.
Connect Azure — Admin consent for the CostGlass application, Reader and Cost Management Reader roles, management group or subscription scope, and a Terraform version.
Connect Google Cloud — Enable the FOCUS BigQuery export, run the IAM grants CostGlass prints, verify, and a Terraform version.
Managing connected accounts — The Cloud Accounts page: statuses, syncing, errors, naming, disconnecting, and the FOCUS 1.0 and CUR Export pages.
Connect Oracle Cloud (OCI) — Give CostGlass read-only access to Oracle Cost and Usage Reports with a Resource Manager stack or your own Terraform.
Connect Alibaba Cloud — Connect Alibaba Cloud through Bill Subscription files in OSS and a read-only RAM role created by a ROS template.
Connect DigitalOcean — Connect DigitalOcean accounts with a read-only personal access token and see invoices by month.
Connect Akamai / Linode — Connect Linode (Akamai Connected Cloud) accounts with an account read-only token.
Connect Cloudflare — Connect Cloudflare usage-based charges with a Billing Read account token and see credits and unpaid debt.
Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog and Snowflake — Connect AI and software vendors with admin keys or a Snowflake key pair so their spend sits beside your cloud costs.
Cost Explorer — Slice, compare and drill into spend across every connected cloud: group by, filters, charts, overlays, details, AI, links and export.
Saved views, saved filters & scheduled emails — Keep, share and email the Cost Explorer views you use often, and reuse include/exclude filters across views and reports.
Reports — Build, compare, export, save and schedule spend reports, with presets, Excel, CSV and PDF exports.
SaaS & AI Spend — Spend and token analytics for OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Datadog, Snowflake and cloud AI services.
Unit Economics — Cost per business unit: define metrics, send volumes, set targets and alerts.
Connect a Kubernetes cluster — Install OpenCost and the CostGlass exporter in your cluster so cost data is pushed to CostGlass every 15 minutes.
Kubernetes Costs page — Understand cluster, namespace, workload and pod costs, idle capacity, rightsizing, carbon and health.
Tagging strategy: getting the most from tags — How to tag cloud resources, enforce tagging, and when to use cloud tags or virtual tags in CostGlass.
Tag Explorer — Group billed spend by the value of a tag, see tag coverage per cloud and drill into resources.
Tag Compliance — Define required AWS tags, measure compliance, and fix missing tags with Quick Tag, batch apply or a CLI script.
Virtual tagging — Allocate spend by team, product or environment with rules, no cloud changes, with a rule builder and CostGlass AI.
Forecasting — Forecast month-end spend, the next months and a yearly run-rate, and simulate the cost of changes.
Budgets — Create spending limits for a cloud, account, service or team, and see how CostGlass budgets differ from native AWS, Azure and Google budgets.
Anomaly detection — How CostGlass finds unusual daily cost, how to tune it, explain it and be notified.
Cost alerts — Alert when spend rises versus the previous day, week, month or quarter.
All alert and notification types — A comparison of every alert and notification in CostGlass, with channel setup and testing.
Issues & annotations — Dated notes on spend, and a lightweight issue tracker for cost work with Jira push.
Savings playbook — A prioritised, step-by-step programme for reducing your cloud bill, with a 30/60/90-day plan.
Savings recommendations — How the Savings page finds, prices and tracks savings for every connected cloud and platform.
Rightsizing — Find servers and databases that are too big, or too small, using real CPU and memory measurements.
Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances — Track coverage, utilisation, expiry and purchase recommendations for Savings Plans, Reservations and committed use discounts.
Instance Scheduler — Start and stop non-production servers on a weekly schedule to stop paying for idle hours.
Giving your team access — Invite people, choose Owner, Admin or Member roles, remove users and limit what they see.
Setting up your organisation hierarchy — Build a tree of nodes, place cloud accounts by hand, rule or CSV, and scope people to a branch.
Designing your hierarchy (with enterprise examples) — Principles and worked patterns for AWS Organizations, single accounts, multi-cloud groups, MSPs and regulated regions.
Single sign-on (SAML & OIDC) — Connect Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace or another provider, verify your domain, test and require SSO.
API keys & AI assistants (MCP) — Create API keys and connect Claude Desktop, Cursor or Claude Code to your cost data.
Audit log — See who changed what and when, with before and after values, kept for 24 months.
Data residency & retention — Your fixed region, how long cost history is kept, purge now and the data handling summary.
Notification settings, Jira & chat — Weekly spend summary, Slack and Teams webhooks, and connecting Jira Cloud.
Troubleshooting & Common Setup Fixes — Solutions for common cloud connection and ingestion issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, and SSO.

All alert and notification types