Manage Costs and Optimize Consumption
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Monitor Flex Credits consumption patterns in your organization.
- Identify high-consumption behaviors and optimize them.
- Apply cost optimization strategies that reduce waste without sacrificing productivity.
- Forecast consumption needs for budgeting and planning.
Case Scenario: Flex Credit Budgeting
Your company just migrated 50 developers from the free tier of Agentforce Vibes to a paid, credit-based enterprise subscription plan. Everyone is excited, and code velocity is up.
At the end of week four, you log in to the Digital Wallet console and freeze: Your team has already burned through 35% of your annual Flex Credit budget in the first 30 days! If you keep up this burn rate, the team will run completely out of credits before month four, blocking development mid-sprint. Let’s see how you can monitor your credit consumption and analyze the consumption data.
To learn more about Digital Wallet, complete the Salesforce Digital Wallet: Quick Look badge.
Monitor Your Credit Consumption
As your organization scales its AI capabilities, keep track of credit utilization and processing power to maintain both operational efficiency and budget control. Salesforce Digital Wallet provides administrators with a centralized, transparent platform to monitor, analyze, and manage resource consumption in near-real-time across your entire Salesforce footprint.
Track the Flex Credit Consumption
Access the Digital Wallet app from the App Launcher, navigate to the Consumption Cards tab, and select the Flex Credits card.
Explore the Dashboard
The dashboard has two main tabs.
- Consumption Overview: Provides high-level visualizations of consumption drivers and forecasting.
- Consumption Explorer: Offers deeper insights into product-specific dimensions like agents, actions, or Data Cloud sources.
When reviewing your consumption dashboard, focus on these four critical metrics.
- Credits Consumed: The total volume of units your organization has used since the card was activated or reset.
- Credits Remaining: Your remaining balance, which is vital to monitor to prevent sudden work stoppages.
- Last Processed: The timestamp of the most recent data sync, shown in your local time zone.
- Usage Type: The specific category of use, showing whether credits went toward data ingestion, search queries, or generative AI actions.
Use filters to get specific insights, such as consumption period, environment type, and usage type, and set custom tags to monitor team and individual consumption.
Set Up Proactive Alerts
To prevent budget overruns or sudden service interruptions, the platform features an automated notification system. Use these tips to set up an alert.
- Percentage triggers: You can set org-wide or card-specific rules—like getting a ping the second credit limit hits 80% capacity.
- Pick your channel: You can choose exactly how you want to be alerted. Digital Wallet lets you route alerts directly to specific admin emails, via standard system notifications, or even straight into a Slack channel so your engineering leads can pivot their strategy mid-sprint before hitting a hard ceiling.
Here’s how to set up your Digital Wallet consumption alerts to stay on top of your budget. Refer to Manage Consumption Threshold Alerts and Notifications for more information.
- Log in to your Salesforce production org as an admin and navigate to Setup.
- Type Flows into the Quick Find box and select New Flow.
- Search for and select the Consumption Threshold Alerts flow template, then select Create.
- Follow any quick on-screen instructions, click Save, and then Activate to start getting automatic alerts before your team runs completely out of credits.
Credit Consumption Optimization Strategy
Getting a handle on your consumption strategy is all about balancing developer speed with smart spending so your AI budget goes the distance.
Reduce High Consumption
To control costs, implement these optimization strategies.
- Limit regenerations: Avoid excessive retries of code answers.
- Streamline context: Share only necessary files rather than entire repositories.
- Focus conversations: Start a fresh thread for new tasks to keep context contained.
- Choose models wisely: Use lighter models for daily tasks; reserve premium models for complex work.
- Use visibility alerts: Set Digital Wallet thresholds to monitor consumption trends.
Troubleshooting
- Missing PSL in Setup: If the required PSL isn’t visible under Setup | Permission Set Licenses, your organization likely lacks the necessary SKU. To fix this, contact your Salesforce account executive. Request a Foundation Entitlement SKU if you need metered access, or the Agentforce 360 Platform—Developer and Admin Tools SKU for unmetered access.
- Unmetered Access Configuration Error: If you can’t configure unmetered access, make sure you have fully completed the metered setup first. Because the entitlement chain is cumulative, unmetered access directly requires a functional metered foundation to be in place.
Key Takeaway
Now you know how to strategically select the right Agentforce Vibes licensing and AI models to balance performance with your organization’s budget. You can actively manage Flex Credits consumption through informed monitoring and optimization to avoid unnecessary costs. And you’re prepared to execute the provisioning workflow and troubleshoot common setup issues to ensure a successful deployment.