Back to Cookbook

Cost Bloodhound

Find the $15K/month in orphaned resources nobody knows about

Hunts through your cloud accounts for wasted spend — orphaned EBS volumes, idle load balancers, oversized instances, forgotten snapshots, unused Elastic IPs. Generates a cleanup report with estimated savings and the commands to fix each one.

House RecipeWork5 min

INGREDIENTS

💬Slack✈️Telegram

PROMPT

Create a skill called "Cost Bloodhound". Scan my cloud accounts for wasted spend. Using the AWS CLI (and/or GCP/Azure equivalents): 1. Find orphaned EBS volumes: `aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters Name=status,Values=available` 2. Find unused Elastic IPs: `aws ec2 describe-addresses` cross-referenced with running instances 3. Find idle load balancers: ALBs/NLBs with zero healthy targets or negligible traffic 4. Find old snapshots: snapshots older than 90 days not referenced by any AMI 5. Find oversized instances: CloudWatch CPU avg < 10% over 14 days (and memory too, if memory metrics are available) 6. Find idle RDS instances: connections < 1 over 7 days 7. Find unattached EBS volumes across ALL regions For each finding, show: - Resource ID, type, region, and tags - Monthly cost estimate - Recommended action (delete, downsize, or investigate) - The exact CLI command to remediate (with dry-run where available) Generate a summary with total estimated monthly savings.

How It Works

Uses your cloud CLI to scan for the common patterns that waste 28-32% of

the average cloud bill. No third-party tool needed — just AWS/GCP/Azure

CLI access.

What You Get

  • Orphaned resources: unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, idle load balancers
  • Oversized instances: comparing CPU usage, and memory usage where metrics exist, to instance type
  • Old snapshots and AMIs that are no longer referenced
  • Idle RDS instances and over-provisioned databases
  • Estimated monthly savings for each finding
  • Cleanup commands (with dry-run options) for each resource
  • Cost trend analysis by service and tag

Setup Steps

  1. Ensure your Claw has read access to AWS/GCP/Azure CLI
  2. Tell it which accounts and regions to scan
  3. Review the waste report and estimated savings
  4. Run cleanup commands (or Terraform import to bring resources under management)

Tips

  • Start with the biggest wins: orphaned EBS volumes and idle load balancers are usually the top offenders
  • Check across ALL regions — forgotten resources in ap-southeast-1 are a classic
  • Run monthly to catch drift before the bill surprises you
  • Tag findings so you can track cleanup progress
  • The savings estimates are conservative — actual savings are usually higher
Tags:#cloud#cost-optimization#aws#devops