Overview
Get proactive notifications on cost changes to help mitigate unexpected cloud spend. Cloud Cost Monitors help you identify cost changes quickly so you can investigate the cause. You can configure your alerts to catch unexpected changes.
In order to configure Cloud Cost monitors, you need to have Cloud Cost Management set up. After it’s set up, you can configure monitors to alert when costs increase or decrease.
Cloud Cost monitors are evaluated with a 48 hour delayed evaluation window, because Cloud Cost data is not guaranteed to be available until 48 hours after usage. For example, a monitor with a lookback of 7 days being evaluated on January 15 examines cost data from January 6 through January 13.
Monitor creation
To create a Cloud Cost monitor in Datadog, use the main navigation: Monitors –> New Monitor –> Cloud Cost.
You can also create Cloud Cost monitors from the Cloud Cost Explorer. Click More… next to the Options button and select Create monitor.
Optionally, click the + Create Monitor button in the cost report side panel.
Select a cost monitor type
Choose between a Compare Costs Over Time or a Set Daily Cost Threshold monitor type.
| Cost Type | Description | Usage Examples |
|---|
| Cost Changes | Compare costs on a daily, weekly or monthly basis | Alert when the difference between today’s cost and the week before is over 5% |
| Cost Threshold | Set alerts on total costs exceeding a threshold in a day | Set alerts when today’s total cost exceeds $10,000 |
Specify which costs to track
Any cost type or metric reporting to Datadog is available for monitors. You can use custom metrics or observability metrics alongside a cost metric to monitor unit economics. For more information, see the Cloud Cost Management page. Use the editor to define the cost types or exports.
| Step | Required | Default | Example |
|---|
| Select the cost metric | Yes | aws.cost.amortized | azure.cost.actual |
Define the filter by | No | Everything | aws_product:s3 |
| Group by | No | Everything | aws_availability_zone |
| Add observability metric | No | system.cpu.user | aws.s3.all_requests |
Set alert conditions
If the cost monitor type is Cost Threshold, you can trigger an alert when the cloud cost is above, below, above or equal, or below or equal to a threshold.
If the cost monitor type is Cost Changes, you can trigger an alert when the cost increases or decreases more than the defined threshold. The threshold can be set to either a Percentage Change or set to Dollar Amount.
Note: For the Percentage Change, you can also filter out changes that are below a certain dollar threshold.
Example: alert when there is a cost change above 5% for any change that is above $500
For detailed instructions on the Configure notifications and automations section, see the Notifications page.
Further Reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
