Overview
Cloud Cost Monitors help you proactively identify cost changes, and understand if you’re projected to go over budget, so you can investigate the cause.
- Instantly view all your cost monitors and filter or search by team, service, tag, provider, or alert status.
- See a summary of how many monitors are set up, which are alerting, and what areas of cloud spend are tracked.
- Create new cost monitors using templates and take action on monitors that need attention.
In order to configure Cloud Cost monitors, you need to have Cloud Cost Management set up.
Cloud Cost monitors use a 48-hour delayed evaluation window, since cost data may not be available until 48 hours after usage. For example, a 7-day lookback evaluated on January 15 examines cost data from January 6 to January 13.
Create a monitor
To create a Cloud Cost monitor in Datadog, navigate to Cloud Cost > Analyze > Cost Monitors and click + New Cost Monitor.
Alternatively, you can set one up from Monitors –> New Monitor –> Cloud Cost, the main navigation, the Cloud Cost Explorer, or through Terraform.
Select a cost monitor type
You can select from the following monitor types:
| Monitor Type | Purpose | Example |
|---|
| Changes | Detect daily, weekly, or monthly cost changes. | Alert when the difference between today’s cost and the week before is over 5%. |
| Anomalies | Identify unusual or unexpected cost patterns.
Incomplete days are excluded from analysis to ensure accuracy. Anomaly monitors require at least 1 month of cloud cost data to evaluate since historical data is required to train the algorithm. | Alert if 3 days from the past 30 days show significant cost anomalies compared to historical data. |
| Threshold | Alert when costs exceed a set value. | Set alerts when today’s total cost exceeds $10,000. |
| Forecast | Alert if forecasted costs will exceed your budget. | Alert daily if the forecasted cost for this month is projected to exceed $500. |
Specify which cost 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.
| 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 |
Use the editor to define the cost types or exports.
For more information, see the Cloud Cost Management documentation.
Set alert conditions
If you are using the Cost Changes monitor type, 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.
If you are using the Percentage Change, you can filter out changes that are below a certain dollar threshold. For example, the monitor alerts when there is a cost change above 5% for any change that is above $500.
For the Cost Anomalies monitor type, you can trigger an alert if the observed cost is above, below, or above or below a threshold compared to historical data.
The agile anomaly algorithm is used with two bounds and monthly seasonality.
If you are using the Cost Threshold monitor type, you can trigger an alert when the cloud cost is above, below, above or equal, or below or equal to a threshold.
If you are using the Cost Forecast monitor type, you can trigger an alert when the cloud cost is above, below, above or equal, below or equal to, equal to, or not equal to a threshold.
For detailed instructions on the Configure notifications and automations section, see the Notifications page.
Define permissions and audit notifications
Choose which teams, roles, users, or service accounts are allowed to view or edit the monitor. By default, all members of your organization have access.
You can also turn on Audit Notifications to alert the monitor creator and recipients whenever the monitor is changed.
Other actions you can take
- View in Monitors to see your monitor’s alert history, adjust visualizations, and review how often it has triggered alerts.
- View in Explorer to open the monitor in the Cloud Cost Explorer for deeper analysis.
- Edit a monitor to update the monitor’s settings or configuration.
- Clone a monitor to create a copy of an existing monitor by choosing Actions > Clone.
- Delete a monitor to permanently remove a monitor you no longer need.
Further Reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
