As your organization scales its applications across many different cloud and SaaS providers, it becomes more challenging to understand your costs. You likely receive your bill at the end of the month, meaning you don’t have real-time visibility into who’s spending what and which services or applications your teams are spending the most on. Changing service costs also makes it difficult to break down your costs and identify what is driving spend, leaving you unable to take action.
Engineering and finance teams need to be conscious of their cloud and SaaS provider costs, including the cost of SaaS providers like Fastly. Fastly’s primary service is a content delivery network (CDN), which optimizes the delivery of web and application traffic to decrease latency and improve performance for images, videos, downloads, and more.
Datadog’s new out-of-the-box (OOTB) Fastly cost integration helps you easily understand and act on your Fastly costs—contributing to visibility into your total cost of ownership. In this post, we’ll explore how Datadog Cloud Cost Management helps you:
- Understand Fastly costs and usage by service
- Break down your Fastly costs with tags
- Correlate Fastly costs with total cloud spend
Understand Fastly costs and usage by service
To set up the integration, you need to create an API token, navigate to the Fastly cost management integration tile in the Datadog app, and add your account name and token. From there, Fastly cost data will automatically start flowing into Cloud Cost Management.
With the Fastly cost integration, you’ll have access to an OOTB dashboard for Fastly costs, which gives you an overview of what teams and services are spending on Fastly and what cost drivers are causing changes.
Datadog automatically attributes Fastly costs, such as fastly.bandwidth, to specific services by using the separate Fastly integration. Additionally, you can add tags like service and team to usage metrics to understand how your Fastly services and teams are performing. This dashboard also automatically attributes Fastly costs back to both your OOTB and custom tags.
For example, the “Top Services that Spend the Most” widget shows you the services spending the most on Fastly over a given time frame, making cost attribution easier than ever.
By combining observability and cost data in a single view, you can compare a percentage of your bandwidth from a particular service with your total bandwidth costs, enabling you to determine how much that individual service spends on bandwidth. Additionally, since cost is a function of usage for Fastly, you can look at trends in Fastly bandwidth or requests to identify why costs spiked.
You can also clone and customize dashboards to break down your Fastly costs into other categories—such as team and environment—depending on which tags you have on your Fastly observability data.
Break down your Fastly costs with tags
Once you understand which services are spending the most in Fastly, you can easily break down costs by Fastly plan, servicename, and other tags to pinpoint and optimize costs.
Through the Fastly Billing API, Fastly costs are tagged by plan name, service name, charge description, and more. Because of this, you’re able to see which Fastly plans (e.g., CDN, Fastly TLS, etc.) and services (e.g., North American bandwidth, requests, etc.) you spend the most on and which ones are increasing costs, enabling you to take action.
For example, you can filter the entire OOTB dashboard to just a Fastly service (such as CDN) and see cost increases. Then, you can check that service’s bandwidth and requests and identify that requests have spiked. You can export that information to a Datadog Notebook and send it to the appropriate service owner to dig deeper.
Additionally, you can set up a Datadog cost monitor so that you’re proactively alerted to similar cost increases next time.
In addition to seeing costs on dashboards, notebooks, and monitors, you’re able to see your Fastly costs directly on the Explorer page in Cloud Cost Management. Here you can further slice-and-dice and group your costs by tags, such as charge_description.
View total cloud spend alongside your Fastly costs
Understanding Fastly cost by service—and major cost drivers—is useful to ensure you and your service owners have complete cost visibility into Fastly. But your services are likely using other cloud or SaaS providers, such as AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, or MongoDB, and Cloud Cost Management natively integrates with these providers and many more for a comprehensive view of your total spend.
Cloud Cost Management helps you flexibly analyze the total cost of each of your services, both in Cloud Cost Analytics and dashboards, where you can break down your costs by any dimension. This allows service owners to easily own their costs as they build software and understand where to target optimization efforts.
You can also see these costs directly in the Service Catalog with the “Total Cost” column. This gives your service owners and teams a quick at-a-glance view into the total spend of each service, helping them immediately pinpoint where high costs are coming from across your infrastructure.
Get costs under control today
With the new Fastly cost integration and dashboard, you can identify who’s spending the most on Fastly and conduct end-to-end investigations for unexpected cost changes in your Fastly bill. The Fastly cost integration is available today in preview for Cloud Cost Management customers.
For more information on Cloud Cost Management, check out our documentation. And if you’re new to Datadog, get started with a 14-day free trial.