/aws-cost-operations

name: aws-cost-operations
description: This skill provides AWS cost optimization, monitoring, and operational best practices with integrated MCP servers for billing analysis, cost estimation, observability, and security assessment.

AWS Cost & Operations

This skill provides comprehensive guidance for AWS cost optimization, monitoring, observability, and operational excellence with integrated MCP servers.

Integrated MCP Servers

This skill includes 8 MCP servers automatically configured with the plugin:

Cost Management Servers

1. AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP Server

**Purpose**: Real-time billing and cost management

• View current AWS spending and trends
• Analyze billing details across services
• Track budget utilization
• Monitor cost allocation tags
• Review consolidated billing for organizations

2. AWS Pricing MCP Server

**Purpose**: Pre-deployment cost estimation and optimization

• Estimate costs before deploying resources
• Compare pricing across regions
• Calculate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Evaluate different service options for cost efficiency
• Get current pricing information for AWS services

3. AWS Cost Explorer MCP Server

**Purpose**: Detailed cost analysis and reporting

• Analyze historical spending patterns
• Create custom cost reports
• Identify cost anomalies and trends
• Forecast future costs
• Analyze cost by service, region, or tag
• Generate cost optimization recommendations

Monitoring & Observability Servers

4. Amazon CloudWatch MCP Server

**Purpose**: Metrics, alarms, and logs analysis

• Query CloudWatch metrics and logs
• Create and manage CloudWatch alarms
• Analyze application performance metrics
• Troubleshoot operational issues
• Set up custom dashboards
• Monitor resource utilization

5. Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals MCP Server

**Purpose**: Application monitoring and performance insights

• Monitor application health and performance
• Analyze service-level objectives (SLOs)
• Track application dependencies
• Identify performance bottlenecks
• Monitor service map and traces

6. AWS Managed Prometheus MCP Server

**Purpose**: Prometheus-compatible monitoring

• Query Prometheus metrics
• Monitor containerized applications
• Analyze Kubernetes workload metrics
• Create PromQL queries
• Track custom application metrics

Audit & Security Servers

7. AWS CloudTrail MCP Server

**Purpose**: AWS API activity and audit analysis

• Analyze AWS API calls and user activity
• Track resource changes and modifications
• Investigate security incidents
• Audit compliance requirements
• Identify unusual access patterns
• Review who made what changes when

8. AWS Well-Architected Security Assessment Tool MCP Server

**Purpose**: Security assessment against Well-Architected Framework

• Assess security posture against AWS best practices
• Identify security gaps and vulnerabilities
• Get security improvement recommendations
• Review security pillar compliance
• Generate security assessment reports

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Optimizing AWS costs and reducing spending
• Estimating costs before deployment
• Monitoring application and infrastructure performance
• Setting up observability and alerting
• Analyzing spending patterns and trends
• Investigating operational issues
• Auditing AWS activity and changes
• Assessing security posture
• Implementing operational excellence

Cost Optimization Best Practices

Pre-Deployment Cost Estimation

**Always estimate costs before deploying**: 1. Use **AWS Pricing MCP** to estimate resource costs 2. Compare pricing across different regions 3. Evaluate alternative service options 4. Calculate expected monthly costs 5. Plan for scaling and growth

**Example workflow**:

"Estimate the monthly cost of running a Lambda function with
1 million invocations, 512MB memory, 3-second duration in us-east-1"

Cost Analysis and Optimization

**Regular cost reviews**: 1. Use **Cost Explorer MCP** to analyze spending trends 2. Identify cost anomalies and unexpected charges 3. Review costs by service, region, and environment 4. Compare actual vs. budgeted costs 5. Generate cost optimization recommendations

**Cost optimization strategies**:

• Right-size over-provisioned resources
• Use appropriate storage classes (S3, EBS)
• Implement auto-scaling for dynamic workloads
• Leverage Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
• Delete unused resources and snapshots
• Use cost allocation tags effectively

Budget Monitoring

**Track spending against budgets**: 1. Use **Billing and Cost Management MCP** to monitor budgets 2. Set up budget alerts for threshold breaches 3. Review budget utilization regularly 4. Adjust budgets based on trends 5. Implement cost controls and governance

Monitoring and Observability Best Practices

CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms

**Implement comprehensive monitoring**: 1. Use **CloudWatch MCP** to query metrics and logs 2. Set up alarms for critical metrics:

• CPU and memory utilization
• Error rates and latency
• Queue depths and processing times
• API gateway throttling
• Lambda errors and timeouts

3. Create CloudWatch dashboards for visualization 4. Use log insights for troubleshooting

**Example alarm scenarios**:

• Lambda error rate > 1%
• EC2 CPU utilization > 80%
• API Gateway 4xx/5xx error spike
• DynamoDB throttled requests
• ECS task failures

Application Performance Monitoring

**Monitor application health**: 1. Use **CloudWatch Application Signals MCP** for APM 2. Track service-level objectives (SLOs) 3. Monitor application dependencies 4. Identify performance bottlenecks 5. Set up distributed tracing

Container and Kubernetes Monitoring

**For containerized workloads**: 1. Use **AWS Managed Prometheus MCP** for metrics 2. Monitor container resource utilization 3. Track pod and node health 4. Create PromQL queries for custom metrics 5. Set up alerts for container anomalies

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