How we used Datadog to save $17.5 million annually

At Datadog, fostering an internal culture of performance optimization has led to significant annual cost savings on cloud spend. By encouraging individual engineering teams to look for opportunities to optimize and share their performance wins in a Slack channel, the company has seen a total of $17.5 million in annual savings from 15 performance optimizations. Datadog's engineers rely on Cloud Cost Management (CCM), Continuous Profiler, and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) to track both performance improvements and cost savings. CCM helps visualize cloud spend across various services and resources, while Continuous Profiler assists in breaking down CPU and memory usage to specific functions and lines of code. NPM provides visibility into network traffic between services, containers, availability zones, and more, allowing for the identification of hidden network costs. By promoting a culture of performance optimization and utilizing these observability tools, Datadog has successfully reduced its cloud spend while maintaining excellent product quality.