Announcing Datadog Integration for Rightsizing

Our integration with Datadog allows customers using AWS to achieve cloud excellence by delivering performance efficiency recommendations that are cost-optimized — a key requirement of financial cloud management and cloud agility.

Cloudability is excited to announce the integration of its cloud cost management platform with the monitoring and analytics platform provider Datadog. This integration delivers performance efficiency rightsizing recommendations that are cost-optimized, which is a key requirement of financial cloud management and cloud agility.

Developing a cloud-native framework helps organizations obtain the highest level of agility, while taking into consideration cost, quality and speed. The AWS Well-Architected framework is a great example. It includes strategies to help customers compare workloads against best practices and obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems.

Understanding Rightsizing and Its Challenges

DevOps and cloud computing have enabled organizations to deliver applications faster and to respond to ever-changing customer and market needs. With the elasticity and scaling of cloud, teams are able to easily subscribe to the number and size of resources needed at a given time. Often resources are overprovisioned to avoid performance problems, resulting in the business paying higher costs than needed. Without cost optimization, organizations could be overspending by more than 70%.

One way to optimize cloud spend is by rightsizing your instances and services. Rightsizing is the process of matching your workload performance requirements to your infrastructure in a way that minimizes cost. When rightsizing, it’s important to understand both the risk associated with making the change as well as the potential savings.

As additional systems are continuously migrated to cloud and new resources are provisioned, rightsizing becomes increasingly complex as visibility diminishes. It’s compounded by the vast amount of raw memory, CPU, disk and network performance data that needs to be processed and analyzed over a period of time to help make the correct rightsizing recommendations. This is incredibly time-consuming work that can’t possibly be done by a human.

Rightsizing Done Right

Rightsizing requires the collection and analysis of system utilization metrics over a period of time. Savings can’t be at the cost of degraded system performance. Therefore, it’s important to avoid clipping when rightsizing. Clipping refers to provisioning a resource that works fine for your workload most of the time, but maxes out during peak periods, resulting in application performance problems.

System utilization metrics can be collected with native instrumentation from cloud providers, which requires installation of agents. Enabling agents to collect metrics also incurs additional cost. In some cases, utilization metrics lack necessary granularity, which can result in inaccurate rightsizing recommendations. Different levels of data granularity and a lack of common instrumentation across cloud providers creates a challenge for customers to get uniform utilization data across different systems.

Datadog Integration for Rightsizing

Cloudability’s integration with Datadog helps cloud architects align their cloud operations with a cloud-native framework, providing Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimization that enables users to:

  • Make informed cost optimization decisions based on well-trusted utilization metrics
  • Analyze spend over time and scale to meet business needs without overspending
  • Create uniform metric granularity across different cloud providers for normalized and accurate rightsizing opportunities across clouds
  • Alleviate the need to install additional agents for collecting utilization metrics

Operations teams that have standardized around Datadog for infrastructure utilization metrics can now enable Cloudability to collect system utilization metrics and deliver rightsizing recommendations.

Using Datadog metrics, Cloudability delivers 10-day or 30-day rightsizing recommendations. The “data source” column in the rightsizing recommendations area within Cloudability indicates the source of the rightsizing recommendations. Datadog-sourced rightsizing recommendations will be shown labeled as “Datadog.”

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All recommendations for rightsizing are arranged with highest cost savings, along with multiple recommendations for risk/savings. Cloudability’s rightsizing recommendations involve an analysis that uses averages and peaks to prevent performance issues.

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