Revenue Lost / Min (active incidents), Datadog

Live $/min loss while incidents are open. Stops being academic and starts being the COO’s number.

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At a glance

The live, per-minute estimate of revenue being lost while a Datadog incident is open. Where Revenue at Risk shows the hourly rate, this card shows the per-minute ticker, which is what the COO and finance team want to read during a live incident. Every minute the displayed value persists is a minute of cost compounding.

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Calculation

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Worked example

Severity factor (SEV-1):           1.00
Commerce baseline (£/min, 14:00):  £160/min
Estimated traffic loss (SEV-1):    35%
Revenue Lost / Min:                1.00 × £160 × 0.35 = £56/min

1. Live cost framing for the response team. “We have a SEV-1” is engineering jargon; “We are losing £56 per minute right now” is finance language. Both teams now share a number. The COO can walk into the engineering Slack channel and ask “are we still losing £56/min?” instead of asking technical questions; the on-call has a clear KPI for “incident is over”.
2. The cumulative cost is computed automatically. After 25 minutes the cumulative number reads £1,400. After 90 minutes it reads £5,040. After 4 hours it would be £13,440. The cumulative grows linearly until the incident closes; the per-minute rate is constant unless severity changes (e.g. SEV-1 downgraded to SEV-2 mid-investigation).
3. The per-minute frame discourages “let’s wait and see if it self-resolves” thinking. Without this card, the team may be tempted to spend 20 minutes investigating before deciding whether to rollback. With “£56/min leaking” displayed live, the team is more likely to rollback immediately and investigate later. The mental model shifts from “diagnose first” to “stop the bleeding first”.

Scenarios that change the per-minute value mid-incident:

Scenario A: Severity downgrades from SEV-1 to SEV-2 at minute 30
  - Pre-downgrade rate: £56/min
  - Post-downgrade rate: 0.50 × £160 × 0.15 = £12/min
  - Cumulative loss at minute 30: £1,680
  - If incident closes at minute 60: additional 30 × £12 = £360
  - Total: £2,040

Scenario B: Second SEV-2 opens during the SEV-1 (unrelated cause)
  - SEV-1 rate: £56/min
  - SEV-2 rate: £12/min (added)
  - Combined per-minute: £68/min until either resolves

Scenario C: Time-of-day shift (incident persists through peak to off-peak)
  - At 14:00 (peak baseline £160/min): £56/min lost
  - At 02:00 (off-peak baseline £40/min): £14/min lost
  - The same severity at different times produces different per-minute numbers
              because the underlying baseline shifts hour-by-hour

1. Per-minute and per-hour are the same number expressed differently. Use per-minute for live dashboards during an incident; use per-hour for executive briefings, status-page banners, and post-incident summaries. The per-minute figure is the live heartbeat; the per-hour figure is the executive frame.
2. The card encourages “stop the bleeding first” decisions. Engineering teams trained on “diagnose first, then fix” can be slow to rollback; the live cost ticker counters this with a clear, ongoing financial argument for immediate action.
3. The cumulative tally during a long incident is sobering. A 4-hour SEV-1 at £56/min is £13,440. Many merchants find that one bad incident per quarter costs more than the entire engineering tooling budget for the year. This is the card that justifies investments in deploy safety, automated rollback, and synthetic monitoring.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Incidents for the active-incident severity (the formula’s state input). Service Catalog for the service the incident affects.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre