Get answers to all your cost related questions right in Slack

Cloud costs are everyone's problem now. Engineers and end users trigger it, managers budget for it, and finance reports on it. But the answers still live in a separate tool that most of the team never opens. The person asking "why did our bill spike?" rarely has a login to the cost platform, and the person who does is already busy.

Clara, nOps's AI-powered FinOps agent, is now available directly in Slack. Instead of switching context to a dashboard, your team can ask cost- and usage-related questions where they already collaborate, and Clara reasons over your live cloud cost data to answer them in seconds.

This isn't a notification feed. Clara is fully conversational. Ask a follow-up, request a breakdown by tag or account, or drill into an anomaly — all in the same Slack thread.

What's New

Clara now accepts natural-language cloud cost and usage questions anywhere it's mentioned in Slack: in a channel, in a thread, or in a DM. It connects to the same live cost and usage data that powers the nOps platform and returns answers directly in the conversation.

Previously, nOps offered one-way Slack alerts: Clara could run scheduled prompts and push summaries to a channel via webhooks. That functionality remains unchanged. What's new is a full OAuth-based integration built on Slack's Events API and nOps. Clara can now receive and respond to questions initiated by your team, making cost data accessible to anyone in the workspace without requiring a separate nOps login.

Conversational Cost Answers

Clara responds wherever someone @mentions it or sends it a direct message. Ask in a shared channel so the whole team sees the answer, or DM Clara for a quick private lookup.

What you can ask:

  • Spend breakdowns by service, account, team, or time period
  • Anomaly investigation — "Why did our bill go up 12% this week?"
  • Commitment coverage — "What's our savings plan utilization right now?"
  • Resource-level queries — "Top 10 most expensive RDS instances this month"
  • Trend questions — "How has our Lambda spend changed quarter over quarter?"

Clara reasons over your live data on each request rather than pulling from a fixed report. Conversations are threaded. Ask a follow-up in the same thread and Clara maintains context from the previous exchange. There’s no need to re-state filters or time ranges.

Scheduled Reports and Recurring Analysis

Clara doesn't just answer one-off questions. You can ask it to deliver recurring insights on a schedule, without configuring anything in the nOps dashboard.

Tell Clara: "Give me a daily breakdown of AI service costs by account" or "Every Monday, summarize our savings plan utilization and top waste opportunities." Clara sets up the recurring analysis and delivers it to the channel or DM on the schedule you specified. No cron jobs, no dashboard bookmarks, no calendar reminders to go check a report.

Use cases that work well with scheduled delivery:

Use CaseExample
Daily AI cost tracking"Analyze my AI-related spend every morning and flag anything that grew more than 10% day-over-day"
Weekly commitment health"Every Friday, tell me our effective savings rate and any commitments expiring in the next 30 days"
Post-deploy cost watch"For the next 7 days, track spend in the prod-ml account and alert me if it deviates from the prior week's baseline"
Monthly team summaries"On the first of each month, give each team lead a breakdown of their team's cloud spend vs. budget"

The scheduled analysis runs against live data at execution time.

To modify or cancel a scheduled report, just tell Clara in the same thread: "Stop the daily AI cost report" or "Change that to weekly instead." No settings page required.

Security

Clara in Slack is workspace-scoped: an admin connects it once, and it's bound to your nOps organization.

Users must belong to the connected nOps organization to receive answers. If Clara can't resolve a Slack user to a valid nOps identity, it won't return cost and usage data.

Who Benefits

Engineering teams get cost context during incidents, deployments, and capacity planning without waiting for a FinOps analyst to pull a report or learning a new tool.

FinOps practitioners reduce ad-hoc "what did we spend on X?" interruptions. Clara handles the routine lookups so practitioners can focus on optimization strategy.

Engineering managers check team-level spend in their standup channel without context-switching to a separate dashboard.

Finance and leadership get quick budget answers in planning conversations already happening in Slack.

How It Works

1. An nOps admin navigates to Settings → [Scroll Down] → Add Clara to Slack in the nOps platform. This initiates an OAuth flow that connects Clara to your Slack workspace.

2. Clara is now available workspace-wide. Team members can mention @Clara in any channel the bot has been added to, or DM Clara directly.

3. On each request, Clara confirms the user has permissions to access your cloud provider integration data within nOps.

4. Clara reasons over your live cost data on each request; there is no special syntax or query language required. The Slack integration runs on nOps's new AI platform, the same one that powers Clara across other tools your team uses.

How to Get Started

1. Log in at clara.nops.io

2. Go to Settings → [Scroll Down]

3. Click Add Clara to Slack and complete the OAuth authorization

4. Start asking questions — @mention Clara in any channel or send a DM

Setup takes under five minutes. If you have questions, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact support.

If you’re new to nOps…

nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s Cloud Cost Management category, and we optimize $4+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.

Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a free savings analysis with one of our AWS experts.