AWS DevOps Agent Gains Two-Way Slack Chat, at $30 an Hour

AWS DevOps Agent can now hold a conversation inside Slack rather than just post into it, Amazon Web Services said Sept. 11. Engineers can @mention the agent in a connected private channel to open an investigation, and every finding, follow-up question and mitigation step is captured in a single thread instead of splitting across a ticketing tool and a dashboard.

AWS DevOps Agent itself is not new. It reached general availability in March 2026 as a tool for investigating and managing production incidents across AWS, multicloud and on-premises environments, according to a review of the product published in April by independent cloud writer Tobias Schmidt. What changed this week is the direction of the Slack connection: earlier versions only pushed findings into a channel, while the new bidirectional mode lets an engineer redirect the investigation from Slack itself, without switching to the AWS console.

What an investigation actually costs

AWS prices the agent by the second it is actively working, not by seat or by incident. Schmidt's review put the rate at $0.0083 per agent-second, which works out to roughly $30 an hour of active agent time, and clocked a single 30-minute investigation at around $15.

What	Amount
Agent-second rate	$0.0083 (about $30/hour active)
Sample 30-minute investigation	About $15
Free trial: incident investigations	20 hours a month
Free trial: proactive evaluations	15 hours a month

New accounts get a two-month free trial that includes 20 hours of incident investigations, 15 hours of proactive evaluations and 20 hours of on-demand SRE tasks each month, per Schmidt's account. AWS's own Sept. 11 post does not repeat any of those figures or say whether the trial allowance changes once bidirectional Slack access is turned on.

The setup step AWS didn't mention

AWS's announcement describes @mentioning the agent as the whole workflow, but getting to that point takes an admin-level step the post skips. Vikas Banage, an AWS Community Builder, wrote in a walkthrough of the integration that "you may need Slack Admin access to install AWS DevOps agent app," and that an engineer without it has to "ask Slack admin to install AWS DevOps Agent App for you." On a team where the on-call engineer and the Slack admin are different people, the two-way chat AWS is promoting depends on a permission most engineers don't hold themselves.

Banage's walkthrough also covers the agent's GitHub connection, which he describes as a native integration that goes beyond notifications: it correlates deployments with incidents and, "in preview," runs automated code review and testing directly against pull requests. AWS has not said when that review feature leaves preview.

Part of a wider pattern of agents in the chat window

AWS is not the only vendor moving incident and coding work into the tools engineers already have open. OpenAI opened a beta of its own Agents API this month, packaging the same kind of tool-calling and orchestration loop AWS DevOps Agent runs on production infrastructure. AWS itself has been pushing agent frameworks into its serverless products too, including changes to how Lambda bills agents built with Pydantic AI so a crashed run doesn't get re-billed on retry. Bidirectional Slack access is a smaller change than either of those, but it points at the same shift: the agent is no longer a separate console tab, it's a participant in whatever channel the incident is already being discussed in.

What AWS has not published is a number for how many customers have turned bidirectional Slack on, or whether the feature changes the per-second billing rate. The next concrete signal will be whether AWS moves the GitHub code-review integration out of preview, which is the one piece of the agent's toolset it has already flagged as unfinished.