Question 1

What is Sunshine and how does it help with Datadog costs?

Accepted Answer

Sunshine is a FinOps platform built specifically for Datadog. It gives platform and finance teams real-time visibility into contract usage, cost forecasting with automatic trend analysis, and on-demand spend tracking across 50+ billing dimensions — so you never get surprised by your invoice again.

Question 2

How long does it take to set up?

Accepted Answer

About 2 minutes. Just connect your Datadog account, import your contract details, and you're done. No agents to install, no code to deploy, no infrastructure changes required.

Question 3

What are on-demand charges and why should I track them?

Accepted Answer

When your Datadog usage exceeds the quantities committed in your contract, the excess is billed at on-demand rates — which can be up to 2x more expensive. Sunshine tracks on-demand usage in real time and can send SMS alerts so you can act before overages hit your invoice.

Question 4

How much does Sunshine cost?

Accepted Answer

Sunshine is free for Sunny Systems clients. For everyone else, the Pro plan has custom pricing based on your Datadog account, with a 7-day free trial — no credit card required. Contact us for a quote.

Question 5

Which billing dimensions does Sunshine track?

Accepted Answer

Sunshine covers 50+ Datadog billing dimensions including Infra Hosts, APM Hosts, Logs Ingestion, Logs Indexing, Synthetics, Custom Metrics, Fargate Tasks, Lambda Invocations, and many more. It also calculates smart allotments — like containers included per host — so nothing slips through the cracks.

Question 6

What is Lighthouse and how does it work?

Accepted Answer

Lighthouse is Sunshine's observability maturity engine. It scans your Datadog environment against 41 automated rules across 8 categories — alerts, dashboards, metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, security, and governance. You get a score from 0 to 100, a maturity level, and actionable findings with specific recommendations to improve.

Question 7

Do I need technical expertise to use Lighthouse?

Accepted Answer

Not at all. Lighthouse runs automatically — just click scan and wait. Every finding includes a clear description of the issue, why it matters, and a concrete recommendation on how to fix it. No observability expertise required.

Question 8

How often should I run a Lighthouse scan?

Accepted Answer

We recommend running a scan after every major infrastructure change, or at least once a month to track your progress. Lighthouse keeps a full history of all scans with trend charts, so you can see how your maturity evolves over time.

Question 9

Why can knowing my observability maturity improve my project?

Accepted Answer

Observability maturity directly impacts incident response time, system reliability, and operational costs. Teams with mature observability detect issues faster, reduce MTTR, and avoid waste from misconfigured monitors or unused dashboards. Lighthouse turns this from a vague goal into a measurable score with a clear roadmap for improvement.

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