Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: AWS Cost & Operations

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

UncategorizedID: leegonzales/aiskills/aws-cost-operations

Repository

leegonzales/aiskills
leegonzalesLicense: MIT
255

Install this agent skill to your local

pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/leegonzales/AISkills/tree/HEAD/AWSSkills/aws-cost-operations

Skill Files

Browse the full folder contents for aws-cost-operations.

Download Skill

Loading file tree…

AWSSkills/aws-cost-operations/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

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.

Fidelity / Degraded Mode (no fabricated numbers)

This skill is primarily a router to live AWS MCP servers. Billing and cost answers are decision-grade — a fabricated number here is materially harmful (wrong budget calls, wrong savings bets). The single most important rule in this skill:

Every account-specific figure MUST come from an actual MCP/tool query you ran this session. This includes any spend amount, cost, bill total, usage number (invocations, GB-seconds, requests, storage GB), savings/right-sizing estimate, forecast, budget-utilization percentage, or anomaly value.

If the relevant MCP server is NOT available (Billing, Cost Explorer, Pricing, CloudWatch, etc. — i.e. you have not actually called the tool this session and received a result):

  • You may NOT state a dollar figure, usage number, percentage, or any phrasing like "you're spending $X on Y", "Lambda is ~$N/month", "you could save about $Z." Not as an estimate, not as an example, not "roughly," not "typically around." No invented numbers, ever — even to look helpful or complete.
  • Refuse and route to the data source. Say plainly: "I need the Billing / Cost Explorer / Pricing MCP server (or an exported Cost & Usage Report / CSV) to answer that with real numbers — here's how to get it: …" Then state what's missing and how the user can provide it (enable the MCP server, attach a CUR export, paste Cost Explorer output).
  • Offer only GENERIC, clearly-labeled best-practice guidance — e.g. "Generic guidance (not your account): Lambda cost is driven by invocations × (GB-seconds) plus request count; common levers are right-sizing memory, cutting duration, and Graviton/arm64." Label it explicitly as generic and structural, never present it as analysis of this account, and never let it collapse into a numbered listicle dressed up as findings.

Self-check before sending any cost/usage answer: "Did a tool call this session return this exact number?" If no → delete the number, name the missing data source, give labeled generic guidance only. A correct refusal beats a confident fabrication.

This gate applies equally to the Cost servers (Billing, Pricing, Cost Explorer) and to the monitoring/audit servers (CloudWatch metrics, Application Signals, Prometheus, CloudTrail) — utilization figures, error rates, and event counts are account-specific and follow the same rule.

Server Routing — which server for which question

When a request involves money or usage, pick the server before answering. These three overlap; disambiguate as follows:

  • AWS Pricing MCP → forward-looking / hypothetical cost of resources you don't have yet. List prices, "what would X cost," region/option comparison, pre-deployment TCO. No account access needed.
  • AWS Cost Explorer MCP → historical, analytical questions about what you already spent. Trends over time, breakdown by service/region/tag, anomalies, forecasts, optimization/right-sizing recommendations. Use this for "analyze my spend on X last month."
  • AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP → current account state: this/last bill total, invoices, budgets and budget-utilization, cost-allocation tag setup, consolidated/org billing. Use this for "what's my current bill / am I over budget."

Rule of thumb: Pricing = future/hypothetical, Cost Explorer = past/analysis, Billing = now/invoices & budgets. If none of these servers is available, do not answer with numbers — apply the Degraded Mode gate above.

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

Audit and Security Best Practices

CloudTrail Activity Analysis

Audit AWS activity:

  1. Use CloudTrail MCP to analyze API activity
  2. Track who made changes to resources
  3. Investigate security incidents
  4. Monitor for suspicious activity patterns
  5. Audit compliance with policies

Common audit scenarios:

  • "Who deleted this S3 bucket?"
  • "Show all IAM role changes in the last 24 hours"
  • "List failed login attempts"
  • "Find all actions by a specific user"
  • "Track modifications to security groups"

Security Assessment

Regular security reviews:

  1. Use Well-Architected Security Assessment MCP
  2. Assess security posture against best practices
  3. Identify security gaps and vulnerabilities
  4. Implement recommended security improvements
  5. Document security compliance

Security assessment areas:

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Detective controls and monitoring
  • Infrastructure protection
  • Data protection and encryption
  • Incident response preparedness

Using MCP Servers Effectively

Cost Analysis Workflow

  1. Pre-deployment: Use Pricing MCP to estimate costs
  2. Post-deployment: Use Billing MCP to track actual spending
  3. Analysis: Use Cost Explorer MCP for detailed cost analysis
  4. Optimization: Implement recommendations from Cost Explorer

Monitoring Workflow

  1. Setup: Configure CloudWatch metrics and alarms
  2. Monitor: Use CloudWatch MCP to track key metrics
  3. Analyze: Use Application Signals for APM insights
  4. Troubleshoot: Query CloudWatch Logs for issue resolution

Security Workflow

  1. Audit: Use CloudTrail MCP to review activity
  2. Assess: Use Well-Architected Security Assessment
  3. Remediate: Implement security recommendations
  4. Monitor: Track security events via CloudWatch

MCP Usage Best Practices

  1. Cost Awareness: Check pricing before deploying resources
  2. Proactive Monitoring: Set up alarms for critical metrics
  3. Regular Reviews: Analyze costs and performance weekly
  4. Audit Trails: Review CloudTrail logs for compliance
  5. Security First: Run security assessments regularly
  6. Optimize Continuously: Act on cost and performance recommendations

Operational Excellence Guidelines

Cost Optimization

  • Tag Everything: Use consistent cost allocation tags
  • Review Monthly: Analyze spending trends and anomalies
  • Right-size: Match resources to actual usage
  • Automate: Use auto-scaling and scheduling
  • Monitor Budgets: Set alerts for cost overruns

Monitoring and Alerting

  • Critical Metrics: Alert on business-critical metrics
  • Noise Reduction: Fine-tune thresholds to reduce false positives
  • Actionable Alerts: Ensure alerts have clear remediation steps
  • Dashboard Visibility: Create dashboards for key stakeholders
  • Log Retention: Balance cost and compliance needs

Security and Compliance

  • Least Privilege: Grant minimum required permissions
  • Audit Regularly: Review CloudTrail logs for anomalies
  • Encrypt Data: Use encryption at rest and in transit
  • Assess Continuously: Run security assessments frequently
  • Incident Response: Have procedures for security events

Additional Resources

For detailed operational patterns and best practices, refer to the comprehensive reference:

File: references/operations-patterns.md

This reference includes:

  • Cost optimization strategies
  • Monitoring and alerting patterns
  • Observability best practices
  • Security and compliance guidelines
  • Troubleshooting workflows

CloudWatch Alarms Reference

File: references/cloudwatch-alarms.md

Common alarm configurations for:

  • Lambda functions
  • EC2 instances
  • RDS databases
  • DynamoDB tables
  • API Gateway
  • ECS services
  • Application Load Balancers