Cloud Cost Management

Overview

Cloud Cost Management provides insights for engineering and finance teams to see how changes to infrastructure can affect costs. It enables you to understand trends, allocate spend across your organization, and identify inefficiencies. Datadog ingests your cloud cost data and transforms it into queryable metrics. If costs rise, you can correlate the change with usage metrics to determine the root cause.

Setup

To use Cloud Cost Management, you must have an AWS account with access to Cost Usage Reports (CURs), and have the AWS integration installed in Datadog.

Note: Data can take up to 48 to 72 hours after setup to stabilize in Datadog.

Generate the CUR

Follow AWS instructions for Creating Cost and Usage Reports, and select the following Content options:

• Include resource IDs
• Automatically refresh your Cost & Usage report

Select the following Delivery options:

• Time granularity: Hourly
• (Optional) Report versioning: Create new report version. Creating a new report for each run allows for some redundancy if errors occur during CUR creation, but it is not required by Datadog. If you do not want updated reports, select the other option.
• Compression type: GZIP
• Format: text/csv

Configure access to the CUR

Configure AWS to ensure Datadog has permissions to access the CUR and the s3 bucket it is stored in by creating a policy using the following JSON:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
      {
          "Sid": "DDCCMListBucket",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:ListBucket"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKETNAME"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "DDCCMGetObject",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:GetObject"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKETNAME/REPORT_PREFIX/REPORT_NAME/*"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "CostExplorerAccuracyCheck",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "ce:Get*"
          ],
          "Resource": "*"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "CURReportDefinition",
          "Action": [
            "cur:DescribeReportDefinitions"
          ],
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Resource": "*"
        }
  ]
}

Tip: Keep the name you created for this policy handy for next steps.

Attach the policy to the Datadog integration role

Attach the new S3 policy to the Datadog integration role.

1. Navigate to Roles in the AWS IAM console.
2. Locate the role used by the Datadog integration. By default it is named DatadogIntegrationRole, but the name may vary if your organization has renamed it. Click the role name to open the role summary page.
3. Click Attach policies.
4. Enter the name of the S3 bucket policy created above.
5. Click Attach policy.

Cost types

You can visualize your ingested data using the following cost types:

Tag enrichment

Datadog adds tags to the ingested cost data to help you further break down and understand your costs.

The added tags correlate the cost data with observability data that your systems provide to Datadog, data from resources configured with AWS Resource tags, and the Cost and Usage Report (CUR).

The following tags are also available for filtering and grouping data:

Cloud costs in dashboards

Visualizing infrastructure spend alongside related utilization metrics can help you spot potential inefficiencies and savings opportunities. You can add cloud costs to widgets in Datadog dashboards by selecting the Cloud Cost data source.