Overview
Datadog bills for AWS hosts running the Datadog Agent and all EC2 instances picked up by the Datadog-AWS integration. You are not billed twice if you are running the Agent on an EC2 instance picked up by the AWS integration.
IMPORTANT: Datadog uses EC2 instance metadata to ensure you aren’t billed twice for hosts both running the agent and being crawled by the AWS integration. If your EC2 instances are configured to require the use of Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2), then you must set the parameter ec2_prefer_imdsv2 to true in your Agent configuration to avoid double-billing.
When you set up the Fargate and Lambda integration tiles, and any custom metrics, it impacts your Datadog bill.
Other AWS resources such as ELB, RDS, and DynamoDB are not part of monthly infrastructure billing, and configuration exclusions do not apply.
AWS resource exclusion
You can limit the AWS metrics collected for some services to specific resources. On the Datadog-AWS integration page, select the AWS account and click on the Metric Collection tab. Under Limit Metric Collection to Specific Resources you can then limit metrics for one or more of EC2, Lambda, ELB, Application ELB, Network ELB, RDS, SQS, Step Functions, and CloudWatch custom metrics.
Ensure that the tags added to this section are assigned to the corresponding resources on AWS.
Note: If using exclusion notation (!), ensure the resource lacks the specified tag.
You can also limit AWS metrics using the API.
Note: Only EC2 (hosts), Lambda (active functions), and CloudWatch Custom Metrics (custom metrics) are billable by Datadog. Metrics integrated for the other services you can filter do not incur Datadog charges.
EC2
EC2 metrics resource exclusion settings apply to both EC2 instances and any attached EBS volumes. When adding limits to existing AWS accounts within the integration page, the previously discovered instances could stay in the Infrastructure List for up to two hours. During the transition period, EC2 instances display a status of ???. This does not count towards your billing.
Hosts with a running Agent still display and are included in billing. Use the limit option to restrict aws.ec2.* metrics collection from AWS and restrict the AWS resource EC2 instance hosts.
Examples
The following filter excludes all EC2 instances that contain the tag datadog:no:
The following filter only collects metrics from EC2 instances that contain the tag datadog:monitored or the tag env:production or an instance-type tag with a c1.* value and not a region:us-east-1 tag:
datadog:monitored,env:production,instance-type:c1.*,!region:us-east-1
Note: In Datadog, uppercase letters are changed to lowercase letters and spaces are replaced with underscores. For example, to collect metrics from EC2 instances with the tag Team:Frontend App, in Datadog, the tag applied should be team:frontend_app.
CloudWatch Metric Streams with Amazon Data Firehose
You can optionally send CloudWatch metrics to Datadog using CloudWatch Metric Streams and Amazon Data Firehose instead of using the default API polling method. If your organization uses the CloudWatch Metric Streams with Kinesis method, AWS resource exclusion rules defined in the Datadog AWS integration page do not apply. You must manage all rules for including and excluding metric namespaces or specific metric names in the CloudWatch Metric Streams configuration for each of your AWS accounts within the AWS console.
Troubleshooting
For technical questions, contact Datadog support.
For billing questions, contact your Customer Success Manager.
