November 2022 Summaries

Vantage has introduced a new feature allowing users to filter AWS Cost Reports based on AWS Cost Categories, enhancing the ability to organize and monitor cloud expenses. AWS Cost Categories enable users to create category rules to group costs using billing dimensions like accounts and tags, facilitating the tracking of expenses across projects or internal business structures. These categories are ingested by Vantage as tags and appear under the Tag filter in Cost Reports, allowing users to select specific categories represented as aws:costCategory:[CATEGORY_NAME]. This integration is designed to help users visualize and manage their spending more effectively through AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets.

Vantage has introduced a new feature that attributes fees for AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to the specific linked account that benefits from the discount, rather than the account that made the purchase. This change is automatically applied to all Vantage customers, allowing for more accurate chargeback reporting by reflecting the costs in the accounts where the discounts are realized. Previously, fees were attributed to the purchasing account, typically the management account, which complicated financial accountability for teams. With this update, Cost Reports will automatically display the allocated fees based on actual usage, providing a clearer financial picture for organizations with multiple linked AWS accounts. The feature is available at no additional cost and is the default setting for all users, although amortization can be toggled off in new Cost Reports if desired.

Datadog, a widely used tool for monitoring and tracing software, presents challenges in cost management due to its complex billing system. The article provides several strategies to optimize Datadog costs, including utilizing committed use discounts, which can offer significant savings, and disabling containerized agent logs to prevent unnecessary billing for logs tracking the agent's performance. Implementing ingestion volume controls and being selective with custom metrics can help prevent overages. Setting an appropriate logging level, such as INFO, is recommended to avoid excessive logging costs. Additionally, routing through PrivateLink can reduce data egress charges significantly, particularly for AWS users. These practices aim to enhance the efficiency of using Datadog's services while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

Vantage has introduced support for OpenCost, an open-source CNCF project, allowing users to monitor Kubernetes pod-level costs across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments. This integration enables real-time tracking and allocation of infrastructure and container costs, providing a more detailed view of expenses compared to the previously supported AWS Container Insights. By retrieving OpenCost data from users' Prometheus endpoints, Vantage allows cost visualization by resource, namespace, service, container, or label. OpenCost's local cost allocation offers a cost-effective alternative, as it avoids the higher expenses associated with storing and querying metrics through AWS Container Insights. Users can integrate their Kubernetes clusters with Vantage by deploying a CloudFormation stack that sets up a Managed Prometheus workspace, which supports cost data imports. This addition enhances users' ability to manage multi-tenant Kubernetes expenses, offering comprehensive cost reports that can be accessed via Vantage's console and API.