Harness Cloud Cost Management vs DataDog

Summary:

DataDog has been a go-to vendor for observability across on-premises and cloud infrastructures, with services that include log management, application performance monitoring (APM), as well as monitoring for security, network, users and more. Given this, it seems a natural extension for DataDog to add cloud cost monitoring to their portfolio. True to their observability nature, DataDog chose to focus on cloud visibility features in their first release and lack any features that proactively manage cloud costs, or even alert users to cost anomalies as they occur.

Cloud cost management is so much more than reporting costs, and if you want to save money, not just report on it, then Harness Cloud Cost Management is the way to go. True to our nature, we focus on automation to increase the efficiency of not only cloud costs, but also of your engineering teams. We create cost savings opportunities that simply don’t exist through manual efforts, saving you up to 70% on your cloud spend.

Multi-cloud and Kubernetes Visibility:

The majority of enterprise’s have cloud infrastructure that spans across multiple cloud providers, allowing them to optimize their cloud use to fit their needs. Cloud native deployments leverage shared cluster resources for the best scalability and resiliency, with Kubernetes found in more than 60% of deployments today. Harness knows this well, and provides out of the box cost perspectives that show you all of your multi-cloud costs in a single view, as well as granular Kubernetes shared cost reporting.

Datadog only supports AWS (as of the date of this report), and has no support for Kubernetes, which means their customers only see a single, monolithic cost figure for all their Kubernetes infrastructure. All costs are displayed by tag names, which is not exactly user friendly or easy to parse. There’s no way to view cloud costs in a context that makes sense for your business, nor surface how your cloud spend is tracking to your budgets.

Cost Optimization:

Datadog can tell you that you have $1M in monthly cloud spend. Is that good or bad? Can you make it better? And why did my monthly cost just jump a half a million last week? These are important questions that you need answers to, and Datadog doesn’t have any way to answer them for you. While you can drill down into the tag level for cost information, there’s no support for reserved instances or savings plans, no recommendations for right-sizing, and most importantly, no cost anomaly alerting in case a test cluster is left running. Simply put, they can’t help you save on your cloud spend.

‍With Harness, you get a full featured cost optimization solution with advanced automation to save you up to 70% on your cloud costs overall, or up to 90% when you deploy Cloud Autostopping to proactively manage idle cloud resources. We give you real-time, granular cost anomaly alerts so that you can stop unexpected cloud spend in its tracks.