More than 80% of container spend is wasted on idle resources, yet most engineering teams are too busy shipping features to manually prune their infrastructure. While Datadog provides the visibility to see this waste, Hykell provides the automation to actually eliminate it.
Engineering and FinOps teams often find themselves at a crossroads: do you invest in a platform that tells you where the money is going, or one that actively puts it back in your budget? For AWS power users, the answer usually involves a strategic combination of Datadog’s observability and Hykell’s automated cloud cost management.
How Datadog manages AWS costs
Datadog’s Cloud Cost Management (CCM) is designed to bridge the gap between infrastructure observability and financial management. By integrating directly with your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and IAM roles, it provides a granular look at how your architectural choices impact your bottom line.
Key features for AWS engineering teams
The platform excels at breaking down EKS spend through specialized <a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/cloudcostmanagement/”>container cost allocation. It provides pod-level visibility that helps you identify spend changes and detect waste within your clusters before it spirals. To keep costs predictable, Datadog utilizes customizable cloud cost anomaly monitors that alert you whenever a specific service or tag exceeds its historical spending pattern.
Beyond simple monitoring, Datadog offers rightsizing recommendations to help you identify optimization opportunities, such as migrating from gp2 to gp3 EBS volumes or resizing over-provisioned EC2 instances. While it includes “Actions” that allow engineers to remediate issues like deleting orphaned EBS volumes directly from the UI, Datadog remains a visibility-first tool. It serves as an excellent foundation for AWS cost monitoring tools, but it still requires a human engineer to review the data and trigger the fix.
How Hykell optimizes AWS spend on autopilot
Hykell takes a fundamentally different approach by operating as an automated execution layer. Rather than just showing you the data, Hykell proactively reduces AWS costs by up to 40% without requiring ongoing engineering effort. This “autopilot” philosophy allows your team to focus on innovation while the platform silently handles the heavy lifting of cost reduction in the background.
Advanced AWS optimization capabilities
- AI-powered rate optimization: Hykell manages a dynamic blend of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs) to maximize your discounts. This achieves an Effective Savings Rate (ESR) often reaching 50–70% on compute, without the risk of long-term lock-in. You can explore how this works on our AWS rate optimization page.
- Automated resource rightsizing: Unlike static dashboards, Hykell continuously adjusts your EC2 and EBS configurations. It can even manage the migration from x86 to Graviton processors, which typically delivers 40–60% better price-performance for your workloads.
- Kubernetes efficiency: Hykell goes beyond basic visibility to dynamically provision nodes based on actual workload demand. It acts like a smart thermostat for your EKS clusters, ensuring you never pay for idle capacity.
- Performance-safe execution: Every optimization is engineered to maintain or improve performance. Because Hykell uses a performance-based model where you only pay a slice of what you save, the platform is naturally incentivized to find every possible efficiency without compromising your uptime.
Concrete AWS use cases: Datadog vs. Hykell
Choosing between these tools often depends on the specific problem you are trying to solve. In many mature environments, they are used side-by-side to handle different stages of the cloud financial lifecycle.
Attributing spend to microservices
If your primary goal is to implement cloud chargeback and showback strategies, Datadog is often the superior choice. Its ability to map costs to telemetry data allows you to see exactly which microservice caused a spike in CloudWatch Logs or data transfer. By leveraging AWS cost allocation tags, you can filter these views by team or environment to foster departmental accountability.
Reducing the EBS and EC2 bill
If you have already identified through a cloud cost audit that you are overspending on storage and compute, Hykell is the more efficient tool. While Datadog will alert you to unattached volumes, Hykell will automatically snapshot and delete them, migrate gp2 volumes to gp3, and rightsize instances during maintenance windows. This removes the “recommendation fatigue” that often prevents engineering teams from acting on rightsizing data.
Managing commitment risk
Managing a portfolio of Savings Plans and RIs is a complex, full-time responsibility. Datadog can show you your current coverage levels, but Hykell actively buys, sells, and converts these instruments as your workloads shift. This eliminates the commitment lock-in that often prevents teams from migrating to newer instance types or exploring different regions, ensuring your discounts are always working as hard as possible.
Choosing when to add or switch to Hykell
Most AWS power users find that Datadog is their map, while Hykell is their autopilot. You should generally stick with Datadog if your primary need is “single pane of glass” visibility across logs, metrics, and costs, or if you have a dedicated FinOps team that prefers to manually review every infrastructure change. It is also the ideal choice if you require deep integration between application performance monitoring (APM) and your billing data.
However, you should consider adding or switching to Hykell if you are facing any of the following challenges:
- Your team has a backlog of hundreds of rightsizing tasks that never get finished because they are not prioritized over new features.
- Your engineers are spending more than five hours a week on cost anomaly detection automation and manual investigation.
- You want to achieve a 40% reduction in your AWS spend without hiring additional DevOps or FinOps headcount.
- You prefer a pricing model where there are no upfront costs and you only pay based on the actual savings generated for your business.
By combining Datadog’s ability to build automated cost dashboards with Hykell’s execution capabilities, you move from reactive cost management to a proactive, optimized cloud strategy. To see exactly how much your current AWS setup is leaving on the table, you can schedule a free cost audit today and see the impact of automated optimization on your next bill.
