External Costs

External Costs is currently in beta.

External Costs is a monitoring dashboard for third party service costs that are not directly from cloud providers. Currently, this includes monitoring for Datadog costs. More third party services are expected to be supported in the future.

Costs displayed through External Costs adhere to the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) spec for accuracy and convenience.

External Costs

Enabling External Costs

Kubecost will require the integration of a service's plugin in order to detect and display costs associated with that service.

Datadog

From your Datadog account, you will need the following values:

• datadog_site: ex. us5.datadoghq.com

• datadog_api_key: ex. c508d4fd3d126abbbbdc2fe96b0f6613

• datadog_app_key: ex. f357b1f4efefb0870109e0d1aa0cb437b5f10ab9

See Datadog's API and Application Keys for help finding your API and application key values.

At a minimum, the following values are required to be applied to your values.yaml file:

kubecostModel:
  plugins:
    enabled: true
    enabledPlugins:
    - datadog
    configs:
      datadog: |
        {
        "datadog_site": "us5.datadoghq.com",
        "datadog_api_key": "847081f247542151fc63b4dXXXX",
        "datadog_app_key": "6515819e6a3fb23c0dc3d6032ffc84XXXXX"
        }

Now update your Kubecost install via helm:

$ helm install kubecost cost-analyzer \
    --repo https://kubecost.github.io/cost-analyzer/ \
    --namespace kubecost --create-namespace \
    --values values-kubecost.yaml

The external costs UI should populate within 25 minutes. You can also confirm the configuration by viewing pod logs to show queries going through.

Configuring your query

Once your costs have populated the External Costs page, you can additionally configure your query to view specific cost metrics.

Date range

Select the date range of the displayed cost data by setting specific start and end dates, or using one of the preset options.

Aggregation

Here you can aggregate your results by one or several categories. While selecting Single Aggregation, you will only be able to select one concept at a time. While selecting Multi Aggregation, you will be able to filter for multiple concepts at the same time. Costs will be aggregated by Domain by default. Fields by which you can aggregate are:

• Zone

• Resource Type

• Account Name

• Provider ID

• Charge Category

• Usage Unit

• Resource Name

• Domain

Filtering

Kubecost supports filtering of the above aggregation categories. When a filter is applied, only resources with this matching value will be shown. Supports advanced filtering options as well.

You can also view the External Costs page from the Cloud Cost Explorer, when aggregating by Provider. Third party services will appear on this page, and when any line item is selected, you will be taken to External Costs.

Additional configuration

Additional settings are available in Helm

kubecostModel:
  plugins:
    enabled: true
    enabledPlugins:
    - datadog
    configs:
      datadog: |
        {
        "datadog_site": "us5.datadoghq.com",
        "datadog_api_key": "847081f247542151fc63b4dXXXX",
        "datadog_app_key": "6515819e6a3fb23c0dc3d6032ffc84XXXXX"
        }
  install:
    enabled: true
    fullImageName: curlimages/curl:latest
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
      seccompProfile:
        type: RuntimeDefault
      capabilities:
        drop:
        - ALL
      readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
      runAsNonRoot: true
      runAsUser: 1000
  folder: /opt/opencost/plugin
  # leave this commented to always download most recent version of plugins
  # version: <INSERT_SPECIFIC_PLUGINS_VERSION>

See also

For more information about External Costs and how costs are queried, see the External Costs API doc.