How do I monitor and control AWS DevOps Agent costs?

AWS DevOps Agent charges $0.0083 per agent-second of active work, with no charges when idle. You can monitor and control costs using the built-in account usage API, AWS Budgets, and Cost Explorer.

Step 1: Understand the pricing model

AWS DevOps Agent bills per agent-second across three task types:

Task Type	Description	Rate
Investigations (Incident Response)	Autonomous incident analysis and root cause identification	$0.0083/agent-sec
Evaluations (Incident Prevention)	Proactive assessments to prevent future incidents	$0.0083/agent-sec
On-demand SRE tasks (Chat)	Conversational queries and ad-hoc operational tasks	$0.0083/agent-sec

Cost reference: An 8-minute investigation costs approximately $3.98. A team running 80 investigations per month at 8 minutes each would spend approximately $318.72/month.

AWS Support credits: Customers on paid support plans receive monthly credits that offset DevOps Agent costs:

• Unified Operations: 100% of prior month's support charge
• Enterprise Support: 75% of prior month's support charge
• Business Support+: 30% of prior month's support charge

Credits expire at month-end if unused.

Step 2: Check current usage with the GetAccountUsage API

Use the GetAccountUsage API to retrieve your current monthly usage and any enforced limits:

aws devops-agent get-account-usage

Example response:

{
    "monthlyAccountInvestigationHours": {
        "limit": 20,
        "usage": 8.5
    },
    "monthlyAccountEvaluationHours": {
        "limit": 15,
        "usage": 3.2
    },
    "monthlyAccountSystemLearningHours": {
        "limit": -1,
        "usage": 1.0
    },
    "monthlyAccountOnDemandHours": {
        "limit": 20,
        "usage": 5.7
    },
    "usagePeriodStartTime": "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z",
    "usagePeriodEndTime": "2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Key fields:

• usage: Current hours consumed this billing period.
• limit: Maximum hours allowed. A value of -1 means no limit is enforced.

During the free trial, limits are set to 20 hours (investigations), 15 hours (evaluations), and 20 hours (on-demand) per month. After the trial, limits show -1 (unlimited — pay-as-you-go).

Tip: Automate this check with a scheduled Lambda function or EventBridge rule to track usage daily and alert your team before costs accumulate.

Step 3: Set up an AWS Budget alert for DevOps Agent

Create a cost budget to get notified before you exceed a spending threshold:

1. Open the AWS Budgets console.
2. Choose Create budget.
3. For budget setup, select Customize (advanced)
4. Select Cost budget - Recommended.
5. Set your monthly budget amount (e.g., $100).
6. Under Budget scope, add a filter:
   • Dimension: Service
   • Values: AWS DevOps Agent
7. Configure alert thresholds (e.g., 80% actual, 100% forecasted).
8. Add notification recipients (email or SNS topic).
9. Choose Create budget.

Using the AWS CLI:

aws budgets create-budget --account-id 123456789012 --budget '{
    "BudgetName": "DevOpsAgent-Monthly",
    "BudgetLimit": {"Amount": "100", "Unit": "USD"},
    "TimeUnit": "MONTHLY",
    "BudgetType": "COST",
    "CostFilters": {
        "Service": ["AWS DevOps Agent"]
    }
}' --notifications-with-subscribers '[{
    "Notification": {
        "NotificationType": "ACTUAL",
        "ComparisonOperator": "GREATER_THAN",
        "Threshold": 80
    },
    "Subscribers": [{
        "SubscriptionType": "EMAIL",
        "Address": "your-email@example.com"
    }]
}]'

Step 4: Monitor with Cost Explorer

To track DevOps Agent spending trends:

1. Open AWS Cost Explorer.
2. Filter by Service = AWS DevOps Agent.
3. Set granularity to Daily to identify usage spikes.
4. Group by Usage Type to see the breakdown across investigations, evaluations, and on-demand tasks.

This helps identify patterns — for example, a noisy alarm triggering excessive investigations — so you can tune your triggers to reduce unnecessary agent invocations.

Step 5: Reduce costs by tuning triggers

If costs are higher than expected, consider:

• Adjust trigger thresholds: Raise alarm thresholds to reduce false-positive investigations.
• Limit concurrent investigations: The default quota is 3 concurrent investigations per agent space. Fewer investigations running in parallel means lower costs during incident storms.
• Scope agent spaces: Use separate agent spaces for different environments (production vs. staging) and only enable triggers on production.
• Review evaluation frequency: Evaluations (incident prevention) run proactively — reduce their schedule if the cost doesn't justify the value.

Important considerations

• No user-configurable usage limits: AWS DevOps Agent does not currently offer a setting to cap monthly usage hours. Use AWS Budgets alerts as your primary cost guardrail.
• Additional charges: Services connected to DevOps Agent (e.g., CloudWatch Logs Insights queries, X-Ray trace retrievals) are billed separately at standard rates.
• Free trial: New customers receive a 2-month trial with 20 hours of investigations, 15 hours of evaluations, and 20 hours of on-demand tasks per month. Usage beyond trial limits incurs standard charges.
• No idle charges: The agent only incurs cost during active work — configuring agent spaces, integrations, and triggers does not incur charges.
• Credits timing: Support plan credits are issued by the 10th of each month and apply to charges within that same month.

Related information

• AWS DevOps Agent Pricing
• AWS DevOps Agent Documentation
• AWS DevOps Agent Quotas
• Creating an AWS Budget
• GetAccountUsage API Reference