Why this matters
If your company runs on Google Workspace, your team lives in Google Chat. That is where the standup happens and where threads turn into decisions. Cost alerts can now go there too.
This is relevant because an alert only does something if it reaches people in a place where they can talk about it. Email is great for a record but not great for a reaction. An anomaly notification sitting in an inbox waits for that person to open it, decide it is real, and then go tell everybody else. The same notification in a team space gets read by many people at once, and one of them recognizes it immediately.
The speed difference is a big advantage. Detection is only worth what it changes, and every hour between an anomaly firing and somebody acting on it is another hour the spend keeps running. Catch a spike the same afternoon and you can shut it off. Catch the same spike days later, and you’re explaining a week of extra spend.
There is a routing benefit here too. Notifications are set per view, so each view can post to the space that owns that spend. Your platform team’s view goes to the platform space. The data team’s view goes to theirs. Nobody has to scan a firehose channel for the alerts that concern them, which is usually how a shared alerting channel ends up being muted.
What we built
Google Chat is now a delivery destination for view notifications, alongside Slack and email. A view’s notifications can now post to a Google Chat space, instead of or in addition to your existing Slack and email delivery.
That covers the notifications tied to a view: weekly and monthly trend notifications, budget alerts, and view level anomaly alerts (including the cost insight that comes with them).
Each one posts to the space as a short message showing the notification’s title. Delivery is configured per view, so different views can post to different spaces.
How it works
It works through Google Chat’s incoming webhooks. You register a webhook once at the organization level, then choose which views deliver to it. Because delivery is attached to a view, any notification tied to that view flows to Google Chat: its trend notifications, budget alerts, and view level anomaly alerts.
Organization-wide anomaly alerts are not tied to a specific view, so they are not part of this release. You are adding a destination, so any Slack or email delivery already set up on that view continues unchanged.The webhook URL is treated as a credential.
See it in the docs → https://docs.cloudzero.com/docs/notifications
