Datadog Usage Management

Datadog provides several tools to help you monitor and manage your usage of various products. In the Cost & Usage section of Datadog, you can view detailed breakdowns of your consumption for logs, metrics, monitors, and other services. Datadog also provides a few out-of-the-box dashboards that help with this as well:

• Log Management
• APM Trace Estimated Usage
• Datadog Cost Overview and Changes

But it's fair to say that you may want to customize these (you can), or unify them into a single pane of glass. You will also want to graph many of the metrics in the datadog.estimated_usage namespace (all of the above dashboards use these) as these will allow you to easily keep track of sudden spikes. That said, dashboards are not enough.

Setting up usage alerts is an absolute necessity to avoid unexpected charges. Using the metrics above, you can be alerted to any anomalous usage or gradual usage that breaches predefined thresholds via the Monitors product. You can also set up cost alerts here as well, which will be discussed more in the next section.