Anomaly Detection for @awscloud bills is stupidly hard to get right. I’m optimistic about what they’ve built—now let’s see how it works in the wild! https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/preview-anomaly-detection-and-alerting-now-available-in-aws-cost-management/

Me: “How hard could it possibly be?!”
@mike_julian, monitoring wizard: “Oh my sweet summer child.”

...there might be some @awscloud UX teething issues.

I'll play your dumb games, but you're going to have to play mine too.

1. I just want you to email me, not play slap and tickle with SNS.
2. That "pop out" indicator generally means "open in a new tab," NOT "navigate in the same pane and blow away my entire form entry."

Somewhere an accountant softly weeps.

So @jpaulreed will object to the term "root causes," I will object to it not being "roots cause," and we both will object to the missing currency decimal place in "$99.6."

Note that section 1.10 of the AWS terms applies.

Given that Anomaly Detection is free and has no downstream cost effects beyond "SNS notifications," this is a bit of a misfire by Amazon Legal.

Someone in my position taunting them seems SUPER smart, right?

The *ACTUAL* preview terms mostly don't apply here. "I can't disclose that the beta exists publicly" but AWS wrote a blog post about it! It's in the console!

What @awscloud absolutely nailed here is that there isn't a whisper of judgement anywhere. "A big spike in spend because of customer traffic" is a good thing! "A big spike in spend because you posted your creds on Twitter" is a bad thing! It doesn't judge, and that's huge.