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.

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

Setup

To setup Cloud Cost Management in Datadog, you need to generate a Cost and Usage report.

Prerequisite: generate a Cost and Usage Report

Follow AWS instructions for Creating Cost and Usage Reports, and select the following content options for use with Datadog Cloud Cost Management:

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

Select the following Delivery options:

• Time granularity: Hourly
• Report versioning: Create new report version
• Compression type: GZIP
• Format: text/csv

Configure the AWS integration

Select your AWS management account from the dropdown menu, allowing Datadog to display tags associated with this account. If you have multiple similarly-named management accounts, view the tags associated with a selected account to ensure you have selected the specific account you want.

Note: Datadog recommends sending a Cost and Usage Report from an AWS management account for cost visibility into related member accounts. If you decide to send a Cost and Usage report from an AWS member account, ensure that you have selected the following options in your management account’s preferences to allow Datadog to have full visibility into the member account:

• Linked Account Access
• Linked Account Refunds and Credits
• Linked Account Discounts

Locate the Cost and Usage Report

If you have navigated away from the report that you created in the setup prerequisites section, follow AWS documentation to find and view your Cost and Usage Reports details.

To enable Datadog to locate the Cost and Usage Report, complete the fields with their corresponding details:

• Region: This is the region your bucket is located. For example, us-east-1.
• Bucket Name: This is the name of the s3 bucket that the CUR is saved to.
• Report Path Prefix: This is the folder name. If viewing Report path prefix from the AWS details page, this is the first section of the path. For example, if Report path prefix is displayed as cur-report-dir/cost-report, you would enter cur-report-dir.
• Report Name: This is the name you entered when you generated the report in the prerequisite section. If viewing the Report path prefix from the AWS details page, this is the second half of the path. For example, if Report path prefix is displayed as cur-report-dir/cost-report, you would enter cost-report.

Configure access to the Cost and Usage Report

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": "DDCloudCostReadBucket",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:ListBucket"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKETNAME"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "DDCloudCostGetBill",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:GetObject"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKETNAME/REPORT_PREFIX/REPORT_NAME/*"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "DDCloudCostCheckAccuracy",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "ce:Get*"
          ],
          "Resource": "*"
      },
      {
          "Sid": "DDCloudCostListCURs",
          "Action": [
            "cur:DescribeReportDefinitions"
          ],
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Resource": "*"
        }
  ]
}

Tip: Make note of the name you created for this policy 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.

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

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.