Workflows

Workflows lets you define optimization policies, route changes through approval queues, and automate low-risk actions — with full audit trails and governance controls.

When to use it

• You want to operationalize optimization recommendations with consistent governance.
• You need an approval process before automation acts on resources.
• You want to track which optimization actions have been taken and by whom.

Open Workflows

Go to Automation > Workflows from product navigation.

Create a policy

1. Click the create-policy action.
2. Define:
   • Name — a descriptive name for the policy
   • Target scope — which accounts, regions, or resource types the policy applies to
   • Conditions — rules that identify resources eligible for the action
   • Action — what the policy should do (rightsize, stop, schedule, etc.)
   • Automation mode — Manual review, Approval required, or Auto-execute
3. Configure notifications and approvers if using Approval required mode.
4. Review and save.

Operate workflows

Area	What to do
Dashboard	Review policy health, run counts, and pending actions
Policy detail	Inspect conditions, recent results, and history
Approvals	Accept or reject queued actions
Automation Runs	Review successful, failed, and skipped runs
Controls	Adjust global governance behavior

Best practices

• Start in manual or approval-required mode — build confidence in the policy before enabling automation.
• Narrow the scope — apply policies to specific accounts, regions, or tagged environments to limit blast radius.
• Test on non-production first.
• Review all run types — failed and skipped runs are as important as successful ones.
• Keep approval evidence — document why each action was approved or rejected.

Related pages

• Recommendations — the source of optimization opportunities that workflows act on
• Agentic FinOps — use the AI agent to investigate before creating a policy
• Resource Scheduling — a specific workflow type for scheduling resource start/stop