> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tierzero.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Digest Agent > Proactive discovery and operational reports that surface hidden issues, trends, and cost insights ## What is a Digest Agent? Also known as **Proactive Discovery**, TierZero Digest Agent actively scans for reliability risks, performance degradation, and creeping observability costs that no alert would catch. It generates comprehensive operational reports and delivers them on your schedule. ## Key Capabilities ### Continuous Monitoring Surfaces slow degradation patterns that slip past threshold-based alerts and go unnoticed until something breaks. * **Slow degradation detection**: Catch latency creep and memory leaks before they trigger alerts. * **Cross-service correlation**: Individual metrics look fine. Together, they tell a different story. * **Historical trend analysis**: Compare against baselines from weeks ago, not just hours. * **SLO burn rate monitoring**: Catch error budget depletion before it breaches your SLO thresholds. ### Anomaly Detection Detects unusual spend spikes, latency creep, and rising error rates before they compound into outages. Each anomaly comes with context and a suggested next step. * **Cost anomalies**: Catch unexpected spend increases before they hit your cloud bill. * **Performance regression**: Surface latency trends and throughput drops, along with the commit that caused them. * **Error rate analysis**: Track error patterns and correlate with deployments and infrastructure changes. ### Pre-Deploy Risk Detection Correlates recent deploys with performance regression. Identifies which commit introduced latency, error rate spikes, or resource anomalies before they become incidents. * **Deploy-correlated regression detection**: Automatically links performance degradation to specific deployments and commits. * **Pre-merge risk scoring**: Surface high-risk changes based on historical deployment failure patterns. ### Cost Intelligence Proactive Discovery scans for cost anomalies, billing spikes, and over-provisioned resources across your cloud infrastructure. * **Billing anomaly alerts**: Detect unexpected cost spikes across cloud providers before they hit your monthly bill. * **Resource utilization analysis**: Identify over-provisioned and under-utilized resources across your infrastructure. * **Auto-scaling policy drift**: Detect when scaling policies diverge from actual usage patterns. * **Capacity trend monitoring**: Surface capacity trends before they become incidents. ### Scheduled Delivery Runs on your schedule via cron and posts results directly to Slack, keeping the whole team informed without manual effort. ## Use Cases ### Detect Emerging Risks Earlier * **Challenge:** Slow drift and multi-week trends (e.g., rising 95th percentile latency) are easy to miss. * **How it works:** Digest Agents compare recent periods against baselines and flag material degradation. * **Outcome:** Early warnings with clear evidence so teams can act before issues escalate. ### Operational Hygiene * **Challenge:** Recurring issues and noisy alerts persist because insights are fragmented and hygiene work is deprioritized. * **How it works:** Digest Agent sections track repeating patterns (flaky tests, noisy alerts, SLO misses), highlight cleanup actions, and link to investigations or tickets. Posting to Slack keeps hygiene tasks visible. * **Outcome:** Continuous improvement loop that reduces toil and alert noise while improving reliability over time. ### Cost Management * **Challenge:** Infrastructure costs grow silently until someone notices a surprising bill. * **How it works:** Digest Agents track spend across cloud providers, identify cost spikes, and surface optimization opportunities (idle resources, oversized instances, unused storage). * **Outcome:** Proactive cost control with clear visibility into where money is going. ### Stakeholder Alignment * **Challenge:** Leaders and partner teams need consistent, comparable updates; ad-hoc reporting creates misalignment and delays decisions. * **How it works:** Scheduled Digest Agents present week-over-week trends (e.g., error rates, latency, cost), summarize incidents and mitigations, and outline next-week priorities. Deliver to stakeholder Slack channels for broad visibility. * **Outcome:** Shared source of truth that speeds decision-making and reduces status meetings. ## How to Create a Digest Agent ### Step 1: Define Task Specify instructions for your digest agent to generate a report or perform a task. * Go to Digest Agents and click "Create Digest Agent" * Add one or more content sections with: * **Section Name**: A label for this part of the report (e.g., "Weekly Metrics Summary") * **Instructions**: What TierZero should analyze and report on * Note: Sections are independent and do not share context with each other ### Step 2: Schedule Set when and where to send your digest report. * **Cron Expression**: Define the schedule (e.g., `0 9 * * 1` for 9am every Monday) * **Slack Channels**: Select channels to post results to * **Discord Webhooks**: Optionally send to Discord * **Notification Format**: Choose between summary or full report ### Step 3: Review Review your configuration and create the digest agent. * Set a name for your digest agent * Review all sections and schedule settings * Click "Create Agent" ## Running Digest Agents ### Manual Runs * From the digest agent page, click "Run Now" to generate a report immediately * Choose whether to send Slack notifications for that run ### Scheduled Runs * Runs automatically based on your cron schedule * Posts to configured Slack channels ### Reviewing Results * See your digest agent runs listed with timestamps and status * Open a run to review the compiled report ## Best Practices **1. Group Context-Dependent Instructions** * Sections are independent and do not share context * If multiple instructions rely on the same telemetry data or intermediate results, keep them together in a single section for higher efficiency **2. Be Specific About Outputs and Steps** * Define the desired report format and the exact "how" (e.g., data sources to use, metrics to compare, thresholds/SLAs) * Specific instructions produce consistent, comparable, and high quality reports across runs **3. Leverage Prompt Studio** * Use [Prompt Studio](/features/prompt-studio) to test section prompts against recent data * Compare versions side-by-side, tighten wording for clarity * Save improvements back to the digest agent ## Example Prompts [Digest Prompts](/prompt-library/digest-prompts)