As federal, state, and local government agencies work to modernize their digital infrastructure and applications, managing costs effectively remains a constant challenge. Federal directives like Cloud Smart indicate the need for public sector IT organizations to track and optimize their cloud spends. However, as an organization’s IT environment grows in complexity, it becomes difficult to correlate cost data and extract useful insights. The implementation of FinOps practices and tools is essential for accelerating IT modernization while helping government organizations scale new technologies sustainably.

By providing real-time insights into cloud expenditures, Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) enables engineers and FinOps practitioners to understand their total cost of ownership, proactively optimize their resources, and identify and understand cost changes. CCM is now deployed in Datadog for Government, our FedRAMP Moderate-authorized cloud region, allowing public sector organizations to safely rely on it. In this post, we’ll discuss how public sector organizations can use CCM to ensure that their cloud migrations and IT modernization efforts are both efficient and cost-effective.

Monitor cloud costs from a unified view

As the public sector increasingly migrates to the cloud, managing cost and showing value against cloud investments has become a top priority for federal and state agencies. Datadog CCM gives government agencies granular visibility into their cloud infrastructure usage, breaking down costs by facets including service, region, and host. FinOps personnel and platform engineers can use CCM to correlate those costs with performance and usage data to find opportunities for optimization, such as unused resources, over-provisioned services, or unexpected spikes in usage that indicate the need for scaling.

If you are supporting a High Impact Service Provider (HISP), it’s crucial that you optimally allocate cloud resources to ensure your application remains performant while adhering to your budget. For example, let’s say you are auditing the cloud spend of an online portal application used by workers’ compensation applicants. Your organization is increasingly directing applicants to use the online portal to provide a smoother application experience and reduce the strain on your contact center. However, your organization is already approaching the limits of its cloud computing budget, and you can’t afford to scale enough to meet the new demand. By using CCM, you discover that a significant portion of your budget is taken up by a set of database hosts running well below their capacity. You determine that if the application team reconfigures the database service to allocate requests across a larger number of partitions on these hosts, you can scale your service without paying for more compute.

In addition to the CCM explorer and query tools, public organizations can also now set up custom monitors and dashboards using CCM metrics. Dashboards help consolidate monitoring data into tailored views that can be easily shared across an organization, while cloud cost monitors can help FinOps personnel and platform engineers stay on top of their cloud and SaaS spending in real-time to proactively avoid overspending.

It’s easy to use Datadog CCM alongside Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Service Management, and Incident Management to bring together context-rich observability insights and cost data within a unified platform. You can combine application performance and infrastructure utilization metrics with cost data in your dashboards to form a holistic view of application performance and cost. Setting monitors on all these metrics and connecting Datadog’s Slack, Jira, and Microsoft Teams alerting integrations can also enable engineering and FinOps personnel to stay on top of cost changes and take action where needed.

Get visibility into the cost efficiency of your cloud migration

As your agency migrates between legacy and modern cloud infrastructures, it can be difficult to ensure that the differences in pricing and utilization won’t swell your spend. Datadog CCM enables FinOps and engineering teams to break down cloud costs by facets, including environment, application, service, and team, to determine the root cause of cost changes.

By filtering your cloud cost data by environment, you can easily compare your spend across legacy and current infrastructures during a migration. This enables you to pinpoint which assets have begun to incur more cost than expected and change your plans accordingly to mitigate the impact on your budget.

Take control of your cloud spend with Datadog

As public sector IT leaders continue to navigate the complexities of modernization, Datadog Cloud Cost Management offers the insights and control needed to manage cloud expenditures effectively. By integrating cost management into their broader IT modernization efforts, agencies can ensure that they are making the most of their cloud investments, driving innovation while maintaining fiscal responsibility.

See our documentation to learn how you can leverage Cloud Cost Management in the Datadog platform alongside the infrastructure, application, network, and security monitoring your teams already rely on. If you’re brand new to Datadog, sign up for a free trial to get started.