Overlay deploy events, Savings Plan purchases, provider changes, and saved business context on Costory cost charts to explain cloud cost changes.
Events add context to cost data. They capture deployments, releases, incidents, provider changes, and business milestones so you can explain why spend changed without switching between billing tools and engineering systems.
Contextualize dashboards with events so cost changes travel with their cause
overlays events directly on your cost charts. You can compare deploys, purchases, incidents, and custom business events with the spend line in Explorer, then save that context to dashboards and reports.Use events when you need to:
Save the context behind a cost change
Correlate deploys, incidents, commitment purchases, and provider changes with spend
Attach event context to Explorer views, dashboards, and reports
Give finance and engineering the same timeline for cost discussions
EC2 spend increases after a deploy marker. Open the event to see which PR was merged and what changed.
A purchase appears on the chart. Verify whether the cost line drops as expected in the following days.
A dashboard widget needs context before you share it with another team. Attach the relevant event overlay so the viewer sees the cost movement and the reason together.
A cost anomaly starts near an outage, migration, campaign, or infrastructure change. Use event markers to rule in or rule out likely causes.
Explorer with event markers showing deploys, purchases, and custom events alongside cost changes
Navigate to Explorer and build the cost query you want to explain.
2
Enable event overlays
Click Show Events in the toolbar. The Events panel opens with available events grouped by category. Toggle categories on or off, or add individual events to the chart.
3
Investigate a cost change
Event markers appear as numbered badges on the chart timeline. Hover over a marker to see the event type, timestamp, and description.
A deploy marker aligns with a cost increase on the same timeline
4
Save the context
Save the Explorer view, add it to a dashboard, or schedule it as a Cost Report so the event context stays attached.
Pair events with waterfall charts. The waterfall shows which services or teams moved. Events help explain what changed around the same date.
You can attach event overlays to dashboard widgets so the context travels with the data. When a colleague opens the dashboard or receives it as a Cost Report, they see both the cost data and the events that explain it.
Events attached to a dashboard widget explain why costs changed
For automated cost change detection, the Digest surfaces high-impact changes and generates AI summaries you can share.
The Events page is where you search, filter, create, and reopen events across your organization. Each saved event can include the date, source, category, labels, description, and linked cost analysis.
The Events page lets you browse, search, tag, and manage events across your organization
From the Events page, you can:
Search by title, source, category, label, or date range
Open an event to review its description and linked context
Add an event to an Explorer chart
Edit manually created events when the context changes
You can log an event from chat. Tell the Costory MCP“add a deploy event for the payments service today” and it creates the annotation so it shows up on your cost charts.
1
Open Events
Navigate to Events from the left sidebar.
2
Create an event
Click New event and enter the date, title, category, source, and description.
3
Add context
Add labels or scope details that help people understand where the event applies, such as environment = production, a cloud provider, a team, or a service.
4
Save
Save the event so it appears on the Events page and can be added to Explorer charts.
To overlay events in Explorer, connect at least one event source:
GitHub
Import deploys and PR merges.
CI/CD
Send pipeline and deployment events.
Custom API
Push business or technical events.
Cloud provider events, including Savings Plan purchases and CUD activations, are detected from billing data. No additional setup is required after billing data is connected.
Pushing a custom event is a single POST /v1/events call with a JSON body. Add it to your CI/CD pipeline and see the Custom API guide for the full spec.
No. Events are metadata. They explain cost changes but do not modify billing rows, allocation rules, or cost metrics.
Can I backfill old events?
Yes. Create an event with a historical timestamp, or post one through the Events API. Costory places it on the correct date in Explorer.
Can saved events be used in reports?
Yes. When events are attached to a saved Explorer view or dashboard, the context can appear in scheduled reports that use that view.
Can I combine events with unit economics?
Yes. Add events to a chart that uses a unit economics formula, such as cost per DAU or cost per transaction. This helps you see whether a deploy increased total spend while efficiency stayed on target.
