Datadog Sheets Now Lets Teams Analyze Cloud Costs in Real Time
FinOps teams have long wrestled with a frustrating cycle. They export cloud cost data, drop it into a spreadsheet, build their reports, and then the data goes stale almost immediately. Datadog is now tackling that problem head-on with a significant upgrade to its cloud cost management with Datadog Sheets offering.
The company announced flexible spreadsheet-style tabs, currently in Preview, inside Datadog Sheets. The new feature connects directly to Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM), meaning teams can run formula-based analysis on live cost data, without ever leaving the platform or rebuilding their workflows in an external tool.
This matters because cost data moves fast. Teams that rely on exported spreadsheets often catch problems too late. With Sheets, any update to cloud spend flows straight into the analysis. Reports stay current automatically.
The feature supports structured tables, calculated columns, and pivot tables. Teams can also write spreadsheet formulas such as VLOOKUP and SUMIF to reshape data, apply business logic, and build custom views for different stakeholders. Finance teams in EMEA, for instance, can see costs in euros using a currency conversion tab that updates every time exchange rates change, just by editing a single cell.
Two practical use cases illustrate the value clearly. First, FinOps analysts can track monthly cloud spend across providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. They pull daily cost data by provider and service directly from CCM, then aggregate it into monthly summaries for leadership. Second, engineering and finance teams can build annual budget forecasts. They start with a live table of historical spend attributed to each team, apply growth rate assumptions, and compare projections against actual spend as the year unfolds. When January costs arrive, the sheet shows immediately whether the team is on track.
Because everything references the live CCM-backed table, there is no re-importing, no copy-pasting, and no version confusion across teams. The cloud cost management with Datadog Sheets workflow keeps everyone working from the same source of truth.
Datadog also offers a templates gallery with prebuilt spreadsheets for common cloud cost use cases. Teams can join the Preview for flexible spreadsheets to get access immediately.
