Datadog & Harness: Bringing Observability & Monitoring to Cloud Costs

Harness Cloud Cost Management is proud to announce its inclusion in the inaugural Datadog UI extension library. As a pivotal step in cloud cost optimization, it is the first and only cloud cost management solution supported as part of Datadog’s UI extensions. 

What is it? It’s an extension within the Datadog interface that brings in the dashboard from Harness Cloud Cost Management. Users can now get visibility into their cloud spend right in their monitoring tool - no more need to navigate to another tool to see the cloud costs associated with their applications and services.

The Burden of Cloud Costs on Engineers

Datadog has long been a key player in the cloud services observability and monitoring space. The needs around observability continue to evolve, and being able to stay on top of cloud costs is increasingly important for developers and ops teams. With management and responsibility for cloud costs shifting left, engineers are more often tasked with staying on top of changes in costs and finding ways to optimize them.

For the engineers tasked with monitoring, this means that they have yet another set of metrics to track - and no great way to do it. They can monitor their usual cloud service metrics using Datadog, but need to have multiple dashboards and tools to achieve the full breadth that includes cloud cost monitoring.

If visibility into cloud costs wasn’t hard enough to get a handle on, engineers also are becoming more responsible for managing and optimizing those costs. It’s not enough any more to see anomalous activity, alert on it, and resolve it; it’s looking at ways to more efficiently use their existing infrastructure. And past that, it’s also the need to stay within a given threshold, or budget, and forecast out what those costs might be.

For teams that have no experience doing this, it’s a tall task they might not be well-equipped for. Thankfully, they can rely on the partnership between Datadog and Harness to bring cloud cost management monitoring and optimization right into their favorite monitoring solution.

Making Cloud Costs Easier for Engineers

Using the Harness Cloud Cost Management UI extension within Datadog is an easy way for teams to monitor cloud costs alongside the key metrics for their cloud services. And for teams that haven’t gotten started yet, they can sign up for Harness for free and start getting their cloud cost metrics piped right to Datadog as part of their regular dashboards.

The widgets included from the Harness dashboard today are: 

• Total Cloud Cost
• Forecasted Cloud Cost
• Cluster Cost Breakdown
• Cost Efficiency Score
• Cost Trend
• Top Recommendations
• Top Spending Clusters
• Top Spending Cloud Services

In addition to these, we plan to add additional monitoring support for key features, such as Anomaly Detection, so that teams can be more proactive about catching and resolving anomalous cost spikes in their cloud infrastructure.

We understand that there are key services and metrics that need to be tracked immediately, and we’ve focused on bringing that to Datadog. While this UI extension is a great start for teams to bring cost observability to their cloud services, it doesn’t tell the whole story. From within the Harness UI extension, users can go right to their full-blown instance of Harness Cloud Cost Management and access the full suite of cloud cost management capabilities.

Automating Cloud Cost Management

Want all the benefits of cloud cost optimization with none of the engineering lift?

‍With the market-first Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping, Harness enables engineering teams to automate the management of idle cloud resources. It is a crucial cloud cost management solution.

This capability is supported within the full version of Harness Cloud Cost Management, which users can access from the Datadog UI extension.

In addition to the market-first autostopping solution, the full suite of Harness Cloud Cost Management supports the following capabilities:

• Deep Kubernetes visibility
• Cost Perspectives
• Cloud Cost Business Intelligence
• Kubernetes Node & Workload Optimization Recommendations
• Cost vs. Performance What If Analysis
• Anomaly Detection
• Budgeting & Forecasting

How To Get Started

For Datadog users, it’s as simple as adding the Harness Cloud Cost Management UI extension. If you haven’t yet created an account with Harness, you’ll need to do that. It’s free and will provide the same functionality as a paid account. And if you’re already a Harness customer, it’s as simple as connecting to your Harness account from within Datadog, and you’re off to the races.

If you want to sign up for Harness Cloud Cost Management, you can get started any time with a free trial.

Happy monitoring and optimizing!