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The AI Cost of Analyzing Incidents

What it would cost in LLM tokens to correlate incidents from Waroom or incident.io with deploys using AI instead of a configurable time window.

What this covers

Change failure rate — one of the 4 DORA metrics — depends on correlating an incident to a recent deploy. moasy.tech does that with a configurable time window and a JOIN LATERAL query against synced deploy data. An LLM-based alternative would read each incident and reason about which deploy, if any, it should be blamed on — a genuinely ambiguous judgment call that benefits from real reasoning, not just a lookup.

The math

This is the lowest-volume category by far — a 5-engineer team at elite deploy frequency still only produces roughly 3 incidents a month (DORA's own point: elite performers deploy often and fail rarely). Each correlation call costs an estimated USD 0.0125 (cheap-tier model) to USD 0.125 (frontier-tier model) — see the full method for how that per-event cost is built.

AI incident-correlation cost by number of teams
Teams Incidents/mo Estimated AI cost/mo
13USD 0.04 – 0.38
515USD 0.19 – 1.88
721USD 0.26 – 2.63

How moasy.tech does it instead

A deploy counts as a failure only when a real incident, classified by your own rules, lands within a configurable window after it — a deterministic query, not a judgment call repeated per incident. See the full implementation on the DORA Metrics feature page, or the full cost comparison, with a calculator, for every integration category combined.

Questions about this estimate

Why is this category so much cheaper than the others?

Purely volume — incidents are rare by design in a healthy elite-performing team, even one deploying multiple times a day. Low event count means low total cost in this model, even though each individual correlation call is no cheaper than any other category.

Does this include the cost of writing an incident postmortem with AI?

No — this counts only the correlation question (does this incident map to a recent deploy) needed for change failure rate. Generating postmortem text is a separate task with its own token cost, not included here.

See change failure rate without the token cost

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