Skills Overview

understand-cloudzero-organization

Purpose

This foundational skill retrieves organization-specific context from CloudZero that is essential for accurate cost analysis. It should run once at the beginning of any analysis session.

When to use

• Required: At the start of any cost analysis conversation
• Before any other cost analysis skill
• When switching to analyze a different organization
• When you need to understand available custom dimensions

What it provides

• Custom dimensions: Your User:Defined dimensions (teams, products, features)
• Dimension meanings: Business context for each dimension
• Workflows: Organization-specific analysis patterns
• Naming conventions: How things are named in your organization
• Cost allocation policies: How shared costs are distributed

Example prompts

Load my CloudZero organization context

What custom dimensions are available in my organization?

Help me understand my organization's cost structure

Key behaviors

• Caches results within a conversation (doesn't re-fetch)
• Other skills automatically reference the cached context
• Should only run once per session unless switching organizations

tag-coverage-analysis

Purpose

Evaluates cloud resource tagging quality and coverage to identify untagged or poorly tagged resources, calculate coverage percentages, and improve cost allocation for showback/chargeback.

When to use

• Setting up showback/chargeback
• Improving cost allocation accuracy
• Governance and compliance reviews
• Identifying unattributed costs
• Measuring tagging policy effectiveness

Trigger keywords

tag, tagging, untagged, coverage, attribution, showback, chargeback, governance

Example prompts

What's my tag coverage?

How many resources are untagged?

Show me untagged costs by account

Which Environment tag values are being used?

Analyze tagging quality for showback accuracy

Output includes

• Executive summary: Overall coverage percentage
• Tag scorecard: Coverage for each critical tag
• Untagged cost breakdown: By service, account, region
• Tag value distribution: What values are used
• Multi-tag analysis: Resources with partial tagging
• Tag quality issues: Inconsistent values, typos
• Coverage trends: Is tagging improving over time?
• Recommendations: Prioritized tagging actions

Critical tags typically analyzed

• Environment (production, staging, development)
• Team or Owner
• Application
• CostCenter
• Project

cost-anomaly-detection

Purpose

Proactively scans for cost anomalies, unusual spending patterns, unexpected changes, or irregularities that may indicate waste, misconfiguration, security issues, or optimization opportunities.

When to use

• Proactive cost monitoring
• Weekly/monthly cost reviews
• Security incident detection
• Waste identification
• Before presenting cost reports

Trigger keywords

anomaly, unusual, abnormal, irregular, unexpected, odd, suspicious, detect issues

Example prompts

Are there any cost anomalies?

Scan for unusual spending patterns

Find any cost issues I should know about

Check for abnormal costs this week

Detect any suspicious cloud spending

Output includes

• Anomaly count: Total detected by severity
• Severity classification: High, medium, low priorities
• Detailed analysis: Each anomaly with impact and cause
• Anomaly dashboard: Summary by category and dimension
• Time-series visualization: When anomalies occurred
• New resources detected: Recently created high-cost items
• Security concerns: Patterns that may indicate issues
• Waste identification: Idle or unnecessary resources
• Action plan: Prioritized remediation steps

Anomaly types detected

• Spikes: Sudden increases then return to normal
• Step changes: Sudden persistent increases
• Gradual drift: Slow increases over time
• New appearances: Resources that didn't exist before
• Disappearances: Resources that suddenly stopped
• Pattern breaks: Usage patterns that changed

Detection approaches

• Statistical (standard deviation from mean)
• Percentage-based (>50% increase thresholds)
• Rate-of-change (unusual acceleration)
• Pattern matching (deviation from historical patterns)

cost-spike-investigation

Purpose

Investigates sudden cost increases by comparing recent spending to baseline periods and identifying which services, accounts, or resources are responsible for unexpected changes.

When to use

• Unexpected cost increases reported
• Monthly bills show significant jumps
• Alerts indicate spending anomalies
• Need to explain "why did costs go up?"
• Investigating budget overruns

Trigger keywords

spike, increase, jump, surge, anomaly, unexpected, sudden change, why did costs go up

Example prompts

My AWS costs spiked last week. Can you investigate what happened?

Why did my costs increase by 30% this month?

Something caused a cost jump on Tuesday. Find out what it was.

Investigate the cost anomaly in my production account

Output includes

• Executive summary: Total increase and primary cause
• Spike metrics: Baseline vs. spike period comparison
• Root cause analysis: Services/accounts driving the increase
• Time-series analysis: When the spike started and if it's ongoing
• Recommendations: Actions to address or prevent

Analysis approach

1. Establishes baseline (previous comparable period)
2. Compares total costs
3. Drills down by cloud provider, service, account
4. Identifies multi-dimensional contributors
5. Checks for new resources
6. Provides root cause and recommendations

top-cost-drivers

Purpose

Identifies and ranks the highest cloud cost contributors across services, accounts, teams, regions, or custom dimensions to help prioritize optimization efforts.

When to use

• Monthly cost reviews
• Budget planning and allocation
• Identifying optimization priorities
• Understanding spending distribution
• Answering "where is my money going?"

Trigger keywords

top, biggest, largest, highest, most expensive, cost drivers, where is money going, prioritize

Example prompts

What are my top 10 cost drivers this month?

Show me the biggest costs by service

Which accounts are spending the most?

What should I optimize first to reduce costs?

Rank my cloud spending by team

Output includes

• Executive summary: Total spend and top 3 drivers
• Ranked breakdown: Top items by selected dimension
• Percentage contribution: Each item's share of total
• Cumulative analysis: 80/20 rule identification
• Multi-dimensional breakdown: Services within accounts, and so on
• Optimization priorities: Where to focus efforts

Analysis patterns

• Service-first: Start with services, break down by accounts
• Organization-first: Start with teams/products, break down to services
• Account-first: Start with accounts, break down by services
• Environment-first: Start with prod/staging/dev, then drill down

cost-trend-analysis

Purpose

Analyzes cloud cost trends over time to identify spending patterns, growth rates, seasonality, and forecast future spending for budget planning.

When to use

• Understanding cost growth trajectory
• Budget planning and forecasting
• Quarterly or annual reviews
• Identifying acceleration or deceleration
• Predicting future spending

Trigger keywords

trend, growth, trajectory, pattern, forecast, over time, month over month, increasing, decreasing, velocity

Example prompts

How are my costs trending over the last 90 days?

Forecast next month's spending based on current trends

What's my month-over-month cost growth rate?

Are my EC2 costs accelerating or stabilizing?

Show me the cost trend by team over the last quarter

Output includes

• Trend direction: Growing, stable, or declining
• Growth rates: WoW, MoM, QoQ metrics
• Pattern analysis: Type of trend (linear, exponential, seasonal)
• Dimensional breakdown: Which services/accounts drive the trend
• Forecast: Projected future costs with confidence ranges
• Recommendations: Actions based on trend analysis

Granularity guidelines

• 1-3 months: Use daily granularity
• 3-6 months: Use weekly granularity
• 6+ months: Use monthly granularity

cost-comparison

Purpose

Compares cloud costs across different time periods, environments, accounts, regions, teams, or other dimensions to understand variations and benchmark efficiency.

When to use

• Comparing periods (this month vs. last month)
• Benchmarking environments (prod vs. staging)
• Evaluating team efficiency
• Understanding regional cost differences
• Measuring before/after optimization impact

Trigger keywords

compare, comparison, versus, vs, difference, between, benchmark, relative

Example prompts

Compare this month's costs to last month

How do production costs compare to staging and development?

Which region is more expensive for EC2?

Compare Team A's cloud spending to Team B

Show me the cost difference before and after my optimization effort

Output includes

• Executive summary: What's being compared and key difference
• High-level comparison: Total costs for each group
• Detailed breakdown: Service-by-service comparison
• Items unique to each group: Resources in one but not the other
• Normalized comparison: Per-unit metrics when scale differs
• Efficiency analysis: What efficient groups do differently
• Recommendations: How to improve higher-cost groups

Comparison types

• Time-based: Period vs. period
• Dimension-based: Environment vs. environment, team vs. team
• Multi-dimensional: Same service across different accounts

service-cost-deep-dive

Purpose

Performs detailed analysis of specific cloud service costs, breaking down by usage types, resources, regions, and accounts while identifying service-specific optimization opportunities.

When to use

• Targeted optimization for a specific service
• Understanding service cost composition
• Finding rightsizing opportunities
• Analyzing RI/Savings Plan coverage
• Investigating service-specific issues

Trigger keywords

deep dive, analyze, breakdown, detailed, specific service, EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda

Example prompts

Do a deep dive on my EC2 costs

Analyze my RDS spending in detail

Break down S3 costs by storage class and bucket

Why is Lambda so expensive? Analyze it for me.

Show me optimization opportunities for my compute services

Output includes

• Service overview: Total cost, trend, share of total spend
• Geographic distribution: Costs by region
• Account distribution: Costs by account
• Usage breakdown: By usage type or resource type
• Tag analysis: Environment, team, application breakdown
• Usage patterns: Time-based patterns
• Service-specific optimizations: Tailored recommendations
• Savings analysis: Current savings and additional potential

Service-specific analysis

The skill provides different analyses based on service type:

• Compute (EC2, Lambda): Instance types, utilization, spot eligibility
• Storage (S3, EBS): Storage classes, lifecycle policies, snapshots
• Database (RDS, DynamoDB): Instance sizing, Multi-AZ, backups
• Networking: Data transfer paths, NAT Gateway usage

custom-dimension-analysis

Purpose

Analyzes costs using organization-specific custom dimensions (User:Defined:*) like teams, products, features, or business units for business-aligned cost visibility and showback/chargeback.

When to use

• Showback and chargeback reporting
• Business-aligned cost discussions
• Product P&L analysis
• Team budget tracking
• Feature cost attribution

Trigger keywords

team, product, feature, business unit, application, custom, showback, chargeback, by custom dimension name, and so on

Example prompts

Show me costs by team for the last month

What's each product's cloud spending?

Break down costs by business unit

Which feature costs the most?

Generate a showback report by team

Output includes

• Cost distribution: Breakdown by dimension values
• Growth analysis: Trends for each dimension value
• Service mix: What services each team/product uses
• Infrastructure distribution: By account and region
• Comparative analysis: Efficiency across dimension values
• Unallocated costs: What can't be attributed
• Hierarchical analysis: If multiple custom dimensions exist
• Showback report: Ready for finance/business teams

Common analysis patterns

• Team-based: Rank teams by spending
• Product P&L: Full cost breakdown per product
• Environment management: Prod vs. non-prod ratios
• Business unit showback: Hierarchical breakdown
• Feature cost tracking: Per-feature economics

Skill Dependencies

All analysis skills depend on organization context:

understand-cloudzero-organization (run first)
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All other skills reference cached context