Questions to ask Ternary

Example prompts for Ternary MCP, organized by finance job — actuals, budgets, alerts, dashboards, reports, savings, and AI ROI.

You do not need to know Ternary MCP tool names.

Ask the financial question you want answered. Your AI assistant can discover the relevant Ternary data and choose the right capabilities.

The examples below match capabilities that Ternary MCP supports today. For clearer results, include the period and the business dimension you care about whenever you know them.

Understand actual spend

What did we spend last month?

What did we spend last month, grouped by provider?

Show our top 10 services by spend for August.

Show GCP spend last quarter by project.

What were our five largest provider costs this month?

Show AWS spend for the current month, grouped by service.

Review budgets

Which budgets are currently at risk or over budget?

Show all budgets ordered from most severe to least severe.

What is the current status of the Infrastructure budget?

Which budgets have the highest projected month-end spend?

Show the spend-to-date and projected spend for our active budgets.

Budget data reflects each budget's latest evaluation, not a historical budget series.

Review cost alerts

Which cost alerts fired in the last 30 days?

Show recent anomaly detections.

Which threshold alerts fired this month?

Show the observed value and baseline for each recent cost alert.

What cost rules are being monitored, even if they have not fired recently?

Ternary returns alerts detected by configured Ternary rules. The assistant does not independently classify raw spend as anomalous.

Review dashboards

List the dashboards I can access.

What reports and budgets are included in the Executive dashboard?

What changed on the Executive dashboard compared with the previous period?

Which widgets moved the most on the Cloud Spend dashboard?

Compare the last seven full days with the seven days before that on this dashboard.

Dashboard comparison is useful when the dashboard already represents a financial view your team relies on.

Work with reports

List my saved reports.

Find the report named Monthly Executive Summary.

Show the data from the Monthly Executive Summary report.

Find reports with "AWS" in the name.

Save this cost analysis as a private report called Q3 AWS Spend.

Creating a private report is the only current MCP write capability.

Review savings opportunities

What are our largest current savings opportunities?

Show our top 10 savings recommendations.

Show AWS savings recommendations.

Which currently applicable recommendations have the highest estimated monthly savings?

Savings recommendations cover the optimization types currently available through MCP. Commitment data is not currently exposed.

Weigh AI spend against revenue

How does our AI spend compare with revenue this month?

Show AI cost and revenue for the last 30 days.

Show AI cost against revenue by product for last quarter.

What is our AI cost relative to revenue for each team?

AI ROI needs revenue in Ternary from a bring-your-own-data import. Per-product or per-team ratios also need a billing rule that assigns that Custom Label to revenue rows. Each question can use one Custom Label.

Start broad, then narrow

A useful pattern is to ask one question, review the result, then drill down.

1. Start with the overall view

   Show last month's spend by provider.

2. Choose an area to investigate

   Break AWS down by service.

3. Focus the result

   Show only the top five services.

4. Save it if useful

   Save this analysis as a private report.

This keeps each step scoped and makes the financial context easier to follow.

Questions that need additional interpretation

Ternary MCP can support exploratory questions such as:

What contributed to higher spend this month?

Help me investigate the increase in AWS spend.

For general ad-hoc period comparison, the AI assistant may need to run multiple Ternary queries and perform comparison arithmetic itself.

Treat those results as an investigation aid, not as a Ternary-computed causal explanation.

A safer finance question names the baseline:

Show AWS spend for August and July, broken down by service, so I can review the largest changes.

For dashboards, use the built-in dashboard comparison capability when you can. Ternary computes the current and prior values and movements on the server.

Questions MCP cannot answer today

Current Ternary MCP does not provide a first-class interface for:

• Ternary Forecasting
• Commitment inventory or commitment recommendations
• Creating or editing budgets
• Creating or editing labels or billing rules
• Case management
• Querying non-FOCUS datasets through the ad-hoc cost-query path

See Capabilities and limitations for the current product contract.