Cloud Cost Recommendations

Overview

Cloud Cost Recommendations provide recommendations on reducing your cloud spending by optimizing the usage of your cloud resources. Datadog generates a set of recommendations by combining your observability data with your underlying cloud provider’s billing data to identify orphaned, legacy, or over-provisioned cloud resources.

Recommendations are run on a daily basis and are automatically refreshed in your account as soon as the recommendations are released.

For all resources, cloud cost metrics are also pulled for that resource

For all AWS resources besides Kubernetes and EC2, AWS metrics are also pulled from AWS CloudWatch

Overview tab with potential monthly savings, potential annual savings, and total number of open cases on the Cloud Cost Recommendations page

You can see the detailed logic for each recommendation type, along with observability metrics or cost data shown on this page.

Recommendation categories

Below are the available cloud cost recommendation categories and their descriptions.

Recommendation Category	Description
Unused resource	Identified resources that are running on legacy hardware or are not utilized efficiently in your cloud environment. You can consider upgrading or removing these resources to reduce your costs and improve the performance of your resources.
Previous generation resource	Resources that are running on legacy hardware, which you can consider upgrading to reduce your costs and improve the performance of your resources.
Over-provisioned resource	Resources that are under-utilized or over-provisioned, which you can consider adjusting the size and configuration of to reduce your costs and improve the performance of your resources.
Rate optimization	Resources that are charged at on-demand rates or could benefit from rate optimization. You can consider modifying these resources to reduce your costs.
Architecture	Resources related to NAT gateways, which you can consider optimizing to reduce unnecessary charges.

Setup

For each cloud account that you would like to receive recommendations for:

Configure Cloud Cost Management to send billing data to Datadog.

Enable resource collection in the Resource Collection tab on the AWS integration tile.

Install the ‘Datadog Agent’ (required for over-provisioned resource recommendations).

Recommendation and resource descriptions

Recommendation Category	Cloud Provider	Resource Type	Recommendation Type	Recommendation Description	Recommendation Prerequisites
Unused resource	AWS	EC2	Unused EC2 Instances	EC2 instances with less than 5% CPU utilization, and less than 10% memory utilization.	Datadog Agent
Unused resource	AWS	EC2	Unused EC2 instance running Redis	EC2 instance running Redis with 0 keyspace hits and is not containerized, a leader, a follower, nor a shard.	Redis Integration
Unused resource	AWS	EC2	Unused EC2 instance running memcached	EC2 instance running memcached with 0 keyspace hits and is not containerized.	Memcache Integration
Unused resource	AWS	EC2	Unused EC2 instance running Postgres	EC2 instance running Postgres with less than 1 concurrent connection and is not containerized nor a replica.	Postgres Integration
Unused resource	AWS	EC2	Unused EC2 instance running MySQL	EC2 instance running MySQL with less than 1 concurrent connection and is not containerized nor a replica.	MySQL Integration
Unused resource	AWS	EBS	Unattached EBS Volumes	Volumes that have been detached from an EC2 instance.
Unused resource	AWS	EBS	Unused EBS Volumes	Volumes attached to a non-running EC2 instance.
Unused resource	AWS	RDS	Unused RDS Instances	RDS instances with 0 database connections and 0 replica lag.
Unused resource	AWS	S3	Abandoned S3 Multipart Uploads	Incomplete multipart uploads.	Storage Lens
Unused resource	AWS	Redshift	Unused Redshift Cluster	Redshift cluster with 0 database connections.
Unused resource	AWS	Elasticache Redis	Unused Elasticache Redis Cluster	Elasticache Redis Cluster with 0 cache hits and 0 replication bytes.
Unused resource	AWS	MQ	Unused MQ Broker	An MQ broker with 0 connections.
Unused resource	AWS	ECR	Old ECR Images	ECR Image bytes are older than 180 days.
Unused resource	AWS	OpenSearch	OpenSearch Cluster	An OpenSearch cluster with 0 connections.
Unused resource	AWS	Classic Elastic Load Balancer	Unused Classic Elastic Load Balancers	Classic Elastic Load Balancer with no active connections that is not attached to an EC2 instance.
Unused resource	AWS	Network Elastic Load Balancer	Unused Network Elastic Load Balancer	A network load balancer with 0 processed bytes.
Unused resource	AWS	Application Load Balancer	Unused Application Load Balancer	An application load balancer with no traffic being processed.
Unused resource	AWS	NAT Gateway	Unused NAT Gateway	A NAT Gateway that has no bytes sent through it.
Unused resource	AWS	Elastic IP Address	Idle Elastic IP Address	Elastic IP addresses with idle charges in your AWS cost and usage report.
Unused resource	AWS	DynamoDB	Unused DynamoDB	A DynamoDB table has 0 consumed reads and 0 consumed non-replica writes.
Unused resource	AWS	DynamoDB	Unused DynamoDB Global Secondary Index	A DynamoDB table’s Global Secondary Index (GSI) has 0 consumed reads.
Unused resource	AWS	Autoscaling groups (ASG)	ASGs with legacy instance types	An autoscaling group that includes legacy instance types.	Datadog Agent
Unused resource	AWS	DynamoDB	DynamoDB Delete Extra On-Demand Backups	A DynamoDB table has charges for more than 2 on-demand backups.
Previous generation resource	AWS	EC2	Legacy EC2 Instance	EC2 Instances that are previous generation, and can be upgraded to a newer instance type.	Datadog Agent
Previous generation resource	AWS	GP2 EBS	GP2 EBS Volumes	EBS volumes that are GP2 and can be upgraded to GP3 for cost reduction and performance improvement.
Previous generation resource	AWS	I01 EBS	I01 EBS Volumes	EBS volumes that are I01 and can be upgraded to GP3 for cost reduction and performance improvement.
Previous generation resource	AWS	RDS	Extended Support RDS Instance	An RDS running an engine version that is no longer supported and incurring extended support charges
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EC2	Over-provisioned EC2 instances	Migrate legacy autoscaling group instances to new types.	Datadog Agent
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EC2	Over-provisioned EC2 instances running Redis	EC2 instance running Redis with less than 25% user CPU and is not containerized, a leader, a follower, nor a shard.	Redis Integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EC2	Over-provisioned EC2 instance running memcached	EC2 instance running memcached with less than 25% user CPU and is not containerized.	Memcache Integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EC2	Over-provisioned EC2 instance running Postgres	EC2 instance running Postgres with less than 25% user CPU and greater than 25% usable memory and is not containerized nor a replica.	Postgres Integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EC2	Over-provisioned EC2 running MySQL	EC2 instance running MySQL with less than 25% user CPU and greater than 25% usable memory and is not containerized nor a replica.	MySQL Integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	Kubernetes containers	Over-provisioned Kubernetes Containers	Containers with less than 30% CPU and memory utilization.	Datadog profiling agent
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EBS	Over-provisioned EBS Volume IOPS	EBS Volumes where the amount of IOPS exceeds what is being used.	*Amazon EC2 integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	RDS IOPS	Over-provisioned RDS IOPS	An RDS instance using less than 80% of the provisioned IOPS for reads and writes.
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EBS IOPS	Over-provisioned EBS IOPS	An EBS volume using less than 80% of the provisioned IOPS for reads and writes.	*Amazon EC2 integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EBS Storage	Over-provisioned EBS Storage	An EBS volume with less than 20% of its storage capacity used.	*Amazon EC2 integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	EBS Throughput	Over-provisioned EBS Throughput	An EBS volume using less than 80% of the provisioned throughput for reads and writes.	*Amazon EC2 integration
Over-provisioned resource	AWS	DynamoDB	Over-provisioned DynamoDB Capacity	A provisioned DynamoDB table using less than 80% of its read and write capacity more than 80% of the time.
Rate optimization	AWS	RDS Reserved Instances	Purchase RDS RI	An RDS instance older than 45 days is still charged with on-demand rates.
Rate optimization	AWS	ElastiCache Reserved Instances	Purchase ElastiCache RI	An ElastiCache node older than 45 days is still charged with on-demand rates.
Rate optimization	AWS	OpenSearch Reserved Instances	Purchase OpenSearch RI	An OpenSearch instance older than 45 days is still charged with on-demand rates.
Rate optimization	AWS	Redshift Reserved Instances	Purchase Redshift RI	A Redshift cluster older than 45 days is still charged with on-demand rates.
Rate optimization	AWS	S3	S3 Tiering	A bucket’s costs are almost entirely in per-GB standard storage, but GET requests indicate few objects are accessed.
Rate optimization	AWS	S3	S3 Non-current Version Expiration Lifecycle Rule	A standard S3 bucket without a non-current version expiration lifecycle and that does not serve a website contains non-current version storage bytes older than 30 days.	Storage Lens
Rate optimization	AWS	DynamoDB	Migrate DynamoDB to On-Demand Capacity Mode	A provisioned DynamoDB table has an hourly read and write capacity consumption below 18% at least once in the last two weeks.
Rate optimization	AWS	DynamoDB	Migrate DynamoDB to Provisioned Capacity Mod	An on-demand DynamoDB table has an hourly read and write capacity consumption that is always greater than 18%.
Rate optimization	AWS	DynamoDB	Migrate DynamoDB to Standard Table Class	Migrating to the Standard table class offers potential savings from capacity rates compared to the additional costs from storage rates, or it uses the Standard table class’ free tier for storage.
Rate optimization	AWS	DynamoDB	Migrate DynamoDB to Infrequent Access Table Class	Migrating to the Infrequent Access (IA) table class offers more potential savings from storage rates compared to the additional costs from capacity rates.
Architecture	AWS	NAT Gateway	NAT Gateway within VPC transfer charges	Resources in the same VPC should avoid communicating with each other through a NAT gateway because that incurs unnecessary NAT gateway processing charges.	NPM
Architecture	AWS	NAT Gateway	NAT Gateway cross-zone transfer charges	Resources that need a NAT gateway should use one that is in the same availability zone, or they can incur unnecessary cross-zone transfer charges.

Cloud Cost Recommendations

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Overview

Recommendation categories

Prerequisites

Setup

Recommendation and resource descriptions

Further reading