Managing GitHub costs

What we have covered so far for action-based cost spending throughout the book was around optimizing the workflows to reduce action spend. But we have not covered yet how to measure or alert when we’re getting close to exceeding our budgets or how to identify slow actions.

Datadog has capabilities here by capturing and visualizing our workflows, but that’s not ideally what it’s there for. In this section, we’ll focus on some alternatives in the marketplace that provide a good overview of where your minutes are spent across all the runners. We’ll then extend it so that we can also have this reported to us via communication tools such as Slack in a FinOps channel.

Let’s first dive into what we can do natively in GitHub.

GitHub spending limits

Managing costs effectively is a key element in the administration of any software development endeavor. As GitHub Actions become more prevalent in CI/CD processes, grasping...