Spotto Chat: Investigate Your Cloud With AI

Overview

Spotto Chat is the in-product AI investigation layer inside the Spotto Portal. It is built for the questions that usually send people bouncing between dashboards, docs, pricing pages, and internal notes: “What is happening here?”, “What should I do next?”, and “What does Microsoft recommend for this?”

Use it for focused page-level questions when you are already looking at a resource, recommendation, or investigation surface, or use it for wider environment questions when you need to reason across subscriptions, cloud accounts, and operational signals.

Feature overview

Spotto Chat is designed to be more than a text box with a cloud logo on it.

It can:

• Answer questions about the page you are on, using the current page context as the starting point
• Handle wider environment questions across your authorized Spotto scope
• Gather evidence before answering, instead of relying on generic completions alone
• Pull in current vendor facts such as official Microsoft documentation and pricing context when the question needs fresh information
• Show progress, citations, and approvals so the answer is easier to trust and easier to act on

For deeper investigations, Spotto Chat can plan the work, gather scoped evidence, consult bounded specialist reasoning, and synthesize a final answer with clear source attribution.

Why use this? (Jobs, pains, gains)

Jobs to be done

• When I am on a page and need fast context, I want to ask about what I am looking at right now, so I do not have to manually reconstruct the story from several panels.
• When I am investigating a wider problem, I want to ask across my environment, so I can move from one page to a connected cloud question without restarting the analysis somewhere else.
• When I need current vendor guidance, I want to check Microsoft documentation and pricing context in the same workflow, so I do not lose time or accuracy by tab-hopping.
• When I am making prioritization decisions, I want evidence and citations, so the answer can survive contact with engineers, FinOps, and security reviewers.

Common pains

• Cloud questions are rarely isolated to one screen, but most tools act like they are.
• Provider documentation is useful, but leaving the investigation flow to find it breaks momentum.
• Pricing and best-practice answers get stale quickly when they are copied into internal notes.
• “AI answers” are hard to trust when they arrive with no evidence trail or no visible access boundaries.

What you gain

• Faster investigation loops: ask from the page you are on, then widen the question when needed.
• Better answers for complex questions: Spotto can gather evidence first, then answer with citations.
• Less workflow fragmentation: operational data, official documentation, and pricing context can be brought together in one place.
• Stronger governance: Spotto Chat works inside Spotto’s scope, policy, and approval model rather than bypassing it.

Key capabilities

Ask about the page you are on

When you are already looking at a recommendation, resource, security view, cost view, or other Portal surface, Spotto Chat can start from that context and help answer “what does this mean?”, “what should I look at next?”, or “how should I act on this?”

This is the fastest way to turn a busy page into a guided investigation instead of a reading exercise.

Ask wider questions across your environment

Some questions are bigger than one page:

• “What are my easiest low-risk cost wins?”
• “Where is secure score weakest across the subscriptions my team owns?”
• “What changed recently that could explain this spend shift?”

Spotto Chat supports broader environment questions across your authorized Spotto scope, so you can move from page-local triage to workspace-level analysis without switching tools.

Investigate with evidence, not just autocomplete

For deeper analysis, Spotto Chat can break the work into a structured investigation flow: gather the right evidence, combine scoped operational signals, use specialist reasoning where needed, and synthesize a final answer.

That matters because the hard questions in cloud operations are rarely solved by one query and one guess. They need evidence, tradeoffs, and a defensible answer.

Check official Microsoft guidance when current facts matter

When your question depends on current vendor guidance, Spotto Chat can use approved external lookups to bring in official Microsoft documentation.

This is useful for questions like:

• best practices for a service or architecture decision
• implementation guidance for a Microsoft feature
• current service behavior, limits, or feature documentation

Spotto keeps those lookups inside the same policy, scope, citation, and audit model used for the rest of the chat experience.

Add pricing context without leaving the investigation

Spotto Chat can also use pricing-aware lookups when the answer depends on current vendor pricing rather than historical Spotto data alone.

This is useful when you need to compare options, check retail pricing context, or validate whether a proposed change is directionally worth deeper evaluation.

Pricing answers should still be treated as current vendor guidance, not invoice guarantees, but they are far more useful than stale spreadsheet folklore.

Use saved priorities as additional context

Spotto already lets you capture company and cloud-account strategy/objectives in the Portal. When relevant to the question, those saved priorities can provide extra context for prioritization and tradeoff discussions.

That means the conversation can be grounded not just in raw telemetry, but in what your organization is trying to optimize for.

For related setup, see Companies.

See progress, citations, and approvals

Spotto Chat is designed as a visible investigation surface rather than a black-box answer generator.

Depending on the question, users can see:

• progress updates during the investigation
• citations and supporting sources
• approvals when an action needs explicit confirmation
• structured activity instead of a plain transcript only

Work inside Spotto’s security model

Spotto Chat does not decide its own access boundaries.

• Scope is resolved server-side
• Out-of-scope access is blocked
• Tool access is deny-by-default
• Mutation-capable actions require explicit approval
• Conversation history and audit artifacts are retained in Spotto-controlled storage for continuity and traceability

Technical reference

Component	Details
Inputs	Current page context, authorized workspace scope, Spotto operational data, and approved external sources when the question needs current vendor facts.
Outputs	Guided answers, progress narration, citations, approvals where required, and actionable next steps tied to the current investigation.
External sources	Spotto can use approved provider lookups for official Microsoft documentation and pricing context when policy allows and the question requires fresh information.
Controls	Server-side scope resolution, deny-by-default tool access, approval-gated mutations, citation preservation, and persisted conversation/audit artifacts.
Best fit	Page-level interpretation, environment-wide investigation, prioritization questions, best-practice guidance, and evidence-backed follow-up on Spotto recommendations and analysis views.

How it differs from external AI assistants

External AI assistants connected through Spotto MCP are useful when you want Spotto data in your own preferred client.

Spotto Chat is different:

• it lives inside the Portal where the current page context already exists
• it can start from the resource, recommendation, or investigation surface you are looking at
• it operates inside Spotto’s own scope, approval, citation, and audit model
• it is designed to hand off naturally into Spotto features like Recommendations, Cost Analysis, Cost Tree, and Security

Use external assistants when you want Spotto data in another client. Use Spotto Chat when you want the Portal itself to become the investigation workspace.

How it works (high level)

• You ask a question from the current page or a wider Portal context.
• Spotto resolves the allowed scope on the server side.
• The system determines whether the question needs a quick conversational answer or a deeper evidence-backed investigation.
• Spotto gathers the most relevant evidence from your authorized Spotto data and, when needed, approved current-information sources.
• The answer is formatted with citations, progress context, and approval handling where required.

Security and data handling

Spotto Chat is built to be useful without being loose.

• Spotto enforces access server-side. The model does not decide what data it can access.
• Spotto Chat is read-only by default. Mutation-capable actions require explicit approval tied to the requested action.
• External lookups are policy-controlled and data-minimized. Spotto sends only the structured arguments needed for the selected lookup.
• Conversation history and audit artifacts are stored in Spotto-controlled storage for continuity, investigation, and traceability.
• Where AI features are enabled, prompts and completions are processed through Azure Foundry model endpoints, with additional Spotto application-layer controls on top.

This is also why you should expect honesty in the docs:

• Spotto may persist chat history and related artifacts for continuity
• current-information lookups may involve approved external providers
• pricing and documentation answers may include freshness caveats

Limitations (honest, boring, useful)

• Spotto Chat only works within the scope you are authorized to access. If a subscription, company, or resource is outside that scope, chat will not widen access to reach it.
• Current-information lookups depend on approved providers being available and allowed for the turn.
• Pricing guidance is useful for comparison and prioritization, but it is not a contract or invoice forecast by itself.
• Some questions still require human judgment, especially when the answer involves production risk, organizational constraints, or change-management decisions.

Troubleshooting

Chat cannot see the data I expected

What you’re seeing: Spotto Chat says it cannot access the subscription, resource, or context you expected.
Likely causes:

• Your current company or subscription context does not include that scope.
• The page context is too narrow for the question you asked.
• The underlying data has not synced yet. How to fix:

1. Confirm you are in the correct company and subscription context.
2. Reframe the question to the current page, or switch to a wider environment question if available in your workflow.
3. If the issue persists, validate that the resource or subscription is onboarded and synced in Spotto.

Chat asks for approval before continuing

What you’re seeing: Spotto Chat asks you to confirm an action instead of continuing immediately.
Likely cause: The requested step needs explicit approval under Spotto’s policy model.
How to fix:

1. Review the action carefully.
2. Approve it only if it matches the intended change.
3. If you expected a read-only answer, rephrase the question to make it clear you want analysis or guidance rather than action.

The answer mentions documentation or pricing caveats

What you’re seeing: The answer includes a note about freshness, source limitations, or current vendor guidance.
Likely cause: The question depended on information that changes over time, such as Microsoft documentation, service behavior, or pricing.
How to fix:

1. Treat the cited answer as the current guidance for the time of the lookup.
2. Follow the linked citations or referenced feature pages if you need to validate the detail further.
3. Re-run the question later if you need a refreshed pricing or vendor-doc view.

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