Monitoring cloud costs can be complex. When those costs span more than one cloud service provider (CSP) or SaaS provider, that complexity can make it difficult to understand your overall spending. Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) enables teams to understand cloud costs, but each provider tags its cost data differently. Teams need to understand each provider’s unique cost data model before they can make sense of their costs in each cloud.

Now, CCM uses the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) to help teams seamlessly explore and analyze their costs across all of their CSPs and SaaS providers. FOCUS defines a standard set of cloud cost data that normalizes the native cost data of each provider into a unified format. CCM automatically tags ingested costs with FOCUS data, mapping each field name from the native cost dataset with its corresponding FOCUS field and applying a tag you can use to explore and analyze your cloud costs as a unified dataset.

In this post, we’ll show you how you can:

• Visualize costs from all clouds with the FOCUS dashboard
• Explore cross-cloud costs with a single query by using Multisource Querying
• Upload FOCUS data to analyze custom costs

Visualize all cloud and SaaS costs

The FOCUS Cost Overview and Changes dashboard surfaces key cost data from all of your clouds and SaaS providers, so you can easily see aggregated costs and per-cloud expenditure. The dashboard is available out of the box (OOTB), so teams can quickly gain visibility with a unified view into their costs and cost trends. The dashboard enables you to automatically report multi-cloud cost data at a meaningful level of detail to engineering teams, FinOps teams, and organizational leadership.

The dashboard’s overview section shows you costs for each CSP and SaaS provider over time. You can break down these costs by account, region, service, and other FOCUS tags. You can also analyze the cloud costs incurred by each team and each service. The Kubernetes Cost Overview section shows your Kubernetes expenditure and identifies idle costs to show you which of your cloud-based Kubernetes clusters, namespaces, and services are least cost-efficient.

Explore cross-cloud costs with a single query

CCM’s Multisource Querying capabilities let you explore cost data across providers and execute custom queries to reveal insights and answer questions. For example, you can compare the costs of similar services to see how one cloud’s compute costs measure up against the others or to look for patterns that explain unexpected cost changes.

Multisource Querying uses FOCUS tags, which present FOCUS metadata as standardized tags. This feature allows you to analyze cost data from multiple sources in a single query without needing to understand each provider’s unique billing data model.

The following screenshot shows data from a cost query across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, grouped by provider name and by the servicename FOCUS tag. The SERVICENAME column shows values from AWS’s lineItem/ProductCode, Azure’s metercategory, and Google’s service_description, even though the query did not specify those provider-specific tags. EC2 and S3 services from AWS accounted for most of the cloud costs in the time frame queried.

As you explore the results of your query, you can refine it to gain a closer look at your cost data. You can create a cost monitor to proactively notify you of costs that change faster than you expect, and you can also export report data to CSV or Datadog Sheets.

Upload FOCUS data to analyze custom costs

Datadog’s integrations for CSPs and SaaS providers make it easy to bring your cost data into the same platform that gives you visibility into your infrastructure and insight on the security of your environment and applications. If your organization collects additional cost data from other sources (such as private clouds and on-prem applications), you can bring that data into Datadog to analyze those costs alongside the CSP and SaaS provider costs you track in CCM.

You can manually upload custom cost data in FOCUS format to extend your cost visibility to any custom providers you need to monitor. Then, you can view your complete cost data on the OOTB dashboard, query custom cost data alongside CSP and SaaS cost data, and alert on custom costs along with your other cost data.

Use FOCUS data for clear insights into your cloud costs

CCM’s FOCUS capabilities simplify cross-provider cost analysis. To get started, enable the integrations for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to collect CSP cost data. You can also collect costs from SaaS providers, including MongoDB, OpenAI, Databricks, and Snowflake. Visit the documentation for more details, or begin your Datadog journey today with a free 14-day trial to unlock unified cost visibility.