How do I get Slack alerts when AI spend spikes?

Connect Slack to Cognocient and get a message the moment an anomaly is detected or a budget threshold is crossed — before it shows up on your bill.

Goal: Slack notification the moment something goes wrong with your AI spend — anomaly detected, budget threshold crossed, or agent looping.

Time: 10 minutes.

Step 1 — Connect your Slack workspace

Go to Settings → Slack Alerts. Click Connect Slack and authorise the Cognocient app to post to a channel of your choice.

The connection is workspace-wide; once connected, each alert type (Budget Alerts, Spend Anomalies, Monthly Reports, Weekly Forecasts) routes to a channel you pick independently — #finance, #engineering, or #general today.

Step 2 — Enable Spend Anomalies routing

In the same Slack Alerts panel, set the Spend Anomalies row to the channel you want. Cognocient's anomaly detection runs continuously against a rolling baseline. An alert fires when:

A feature's spend is significantly above its rolling average for that time-of-day and day-of-week
A call-frequency spike suggests a retry loop or polling pattern
A new feature starts spending without any attribution headers (invisible spend)

Each Slack message includes the feature name, anomaly type, and a root-cause hypothesis. Slack is currently the only delivery channel — see Anomaly Detection for what's supported today.

You can also set Quiet Hours in the same panel to suppress alerts overnight.

Step 3 — Set Slack-visible thresholds on your budgets

Each budget has its own alert thresholds — the default is 50%, 80%, and 100% of the limit, editable per budget from Budgets → (select a budget) → Edit:

Threshold	What happens
50%	Alert fires — early awareness
80%	Alert fires — start investigating
100%	Alert fires — limit reached, enforcement mode applies

Whether that alert is delivered to Slack depends on the Budget Alerts routing you set in Step 1.

Step 4 — Test it

Temporarily set a budget to a very low limit (e.g. $0.01) and make a call. You should see the Slack message within 30 seconds. Restore the real limit after testing.

What a Cognocient Slack alert looks like

⚠️  AI Spend Anomaly — ticket-resolver
Feature spend: $340 (last 2h)
Normal baseline: $12/day
Projected extra cost: $1,020 if unresolved

→ View in Live Calls
→ Block session

🔴  Budget threshold hit — Engineering Department
$1,680 / $2,000 (84%)
Top contributors: ticket-resolver ($1,100), search ($420)

→ View Budget
→ Adjust limit