Quickstart: How to set up automated cloud cost reporting in 30 minutes
Step-by-step guide to connect AWS, GCP, Azure and Datadog to Costory. Set up automated FinOps Slack & Teams cost reports in 30 minutes, free trial included.
New to Costory? Read the Welcome page for how the product fits DevOps workflows, then follow the steps below.
Costory's scheduled reports deliver actionable insights on cloud costs directly to your workspace.
Here’s what you can expect in 30 minutes:
Set up your 14-day free trial with your cloud billing data connected.
Get a unified view of your costs across teams, providers, and environments.
Receive your first Costory report in your team’s inbox (Slack, Teams, or email).
Prerequisites for Costory cloud cost management setup
Cloud billing admin access: Be a billing admin on your cloud provider account. Marketplace admins can also purchase Costory from the marketplace at the end of onboarding.
Slack or Teams app install: Have your Slack or Teams admin ready to install the Costory app, or hold admin permissions yourself.
If you have an existing export, you will be able to import it directly in Costory.
If you need to create a new report, AWS takes between 6 and 12 hours to export the first file. And 12-24 hours to backfill the historical data. Costory will ping you when your data is ready.
Click new datasource and select GCP. You will see your Costory service account email. Share your BigQuery dataset with it using these IAM roles: BigQuery Data Viewer and BigQuery Metadata Viewer.
The data will be available in Costory within 10 minutes.
Azure setup
If you have an existing export, you will be able to import it directly in Costory.
If you need to create a new report, Azure takes between 5 and 10 minutes to export the first file. You can then trigger backfills (~1 hour).
Datadog setup
The data will be available in Costory within 10 minutes.
3
Wait for your data to be ingested: (from 10 minutes to 24 hours depending on your luck but mostly on your provider...)
Costory will ingest your data and make it available.
Depending on your provider, the first export may take from 10 minutes (GCP, Azure) to several hours (AWS).
Step 2: Automate your cloud cost reporting (20 minutes)
1
Create Dimensions: Costory automatically finds your best labels: 5 minutes
Costory will read your existing labels across providers, suggest merges and mappings to standardize keys and values.Going from 3 labels: env, environment, k8s_label_env with many different values to a single label: environment, with only 3 values: development, staging, production.You can review those in the Dimensions page, and add more transformations to your labels:
Dimensions let you merge labels and map values into clean reporting fields
Dimensions keep Explorer clean with only the
meaningful labels and values. They also help our AI assistant better
understand your data and keep its explanations clear and actionable.
2
Verify Billing Data: 5 minutes
Explore the cost using Last Month date preset, or Last invoice month (uses invoice date instead of usage dates).
Check your last month costs and compare them to your invoice
Check that the amounts are correct. Trust the data before building reports on top of it.Useful docs:
Start from template dashboards instead of building from scratch. Costory templates cover the most common FinOps scenarios, and Costory suggests relevant ones for you.
Start from a template dashboard and customize it to your needs
Dashboards cover Kubernetes cost and waste, EC2 and Savings Plan coverage, network costs, realized savings, and more.If you connect Costory MCP, you can also skip the blank canvas: ask Claude or Cursor to “build a dashboard for Kubernetes cost by namespace” and it drafts the widgets for you.Alert templates notify you when:
The cost of your R&D environment is above your production costs.
The data scientists started two VMs with huge GPU during the week-end.
Reserved instances are not fully used.
Your savings plan no longer covers 50% of your costs.
A mandatory tag is no longer attached to most of your costs.
Your K8S waste ratio is above 75%.
Review active alerts for common FinOps scenarios
4
Automate Slack and Teams Cost Reports: Share costs with your team: 5 minutes
Teams own cloud costs once they can see them.Share a weekly and a monthly report via Slack, Teams, or email. You can share any view:
