How Much Is Egress Network Traffic Costing You?

Egress network traffic is a necessary part of modern network operations, but it can also be a significant expense. Organizations can get blindsided by unexpectedly large bills from cloud service providers and struggle with a lack of visibility to understand where those costs are coming from. 

A Gartner report found that “most clients spend 10% to 15% of their cloud bills on egress costs.” Another study revealed that over 53% of organizations had exceeded their cloud storage budgets, with unanticipated data center egress fees ranking as one of the top reasons for the overage. Adding to the complexity is the shift to multicloud environments, which can introduce even more uncertainty, as organizations now face unpredictable costs across multiple cloud providers.

As your team observes traffic spikes over time, you may need to request additional funding to expand capacity. However, these requests are often met with a critical question: “Why?”

Simply responding with, “Because we’re reaching our limit,” is unlikely to suffice. Leadership will expect a detailed justification and a sustainable solution, rather than a reactive increase in spending. The underlying issue could stem from a misbehaving application, non-business traffic consuming network resources, or inefficient traffic routing. Identifying the root cause is essential, but many teams struggle due to a lack of visibility—making it a key challenge in effectively addressing capacity concerns.

How to Cut Costs by Solving Egress Traffic Challenges

The first step in addressing costly egress traffic issues is recognizing there’s a problem, and the second is creating a plan to address the applications and usage patterns creating those costly traffic spikes. For example, if you have a bandwidth-heavy application, you might place it as geographically close to the users or dependent servers as possible. This change improves performance and reduces the risk of incurring unexpected charges.

Next, you might use caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) or even maximize compression and / or communication patterns in your applications. Where appropriate, you could even establish transit or peering relationships. These relationships can help you avoid the high fees associated with egress traffic by directly connecting to other networks or routing traffic in a way that’s more cost-effective.

To mitigate the risk of unexpected egress charges, it’s important to understand exactly what your cloud provider charges for traffic. You’ll need deep visibility into that traffic. With this intelligence, you can begin making decisions on the best places to place infrastructure, where and  how to route traffic, and, ultimately, reduce costs, and even increase performance.

How Network Observability Prevents Costly Traffic Surprises

A primary challenge with unexpected and costly egress traffic is visibility gaps. Knowing network utilization simply isn’t enough. You need to know what applications, hosts, clients, servers, infrastructure, and business units are driving the traffic, how much bandwidth is used, and how often. A network observability solution provides these insights, giving you a clear view of how traffic is moving and the sources of traffic spikes. With this understanding, you can make more informed decisions, adjust your network architecture for maximum performance and cost savings, and most importantly, be great at what you do, because, hey, you’re improving customer experience while driving down cost.

Network observability solutions can alert you when traffic volumes are high or simply unexpected. By using machine learning or tried and true static baselines, you’ll be notified of anomalous traffic patterns, helping control costs even in ways you cannot foresee. With network traffic pattern monitoring, network engineers can investigate the issue and address it before it escalates, minimizing expenses.

Essentially, a network observability solution acts as a context-aware early warning system. For example, you might get an alert at 8:15 AM indicating packet loss on a VPN. By looking at VPN connections per second and throughput, you identify that you are hitting your VPN appliance limitations. When you look back further in time, you can see that this tends to happen around the same time but only on Thursdays. Are there more people working on Thursdays? Should you beef up your VPN infrastructure or license? 

Upon further investigation, you're able to correlate this event with a large data transfer from a database server. When you loop in your server team, using your data, they are able to confirm it's their fault and fix the problem. They had a misconfigured backup job that is dominating the VPN connection from cloud to data center. The problem was investigated and solved and money saved, even before customers complained. This level of context and traffic history helps organizations solve problems fast and keep unnecessary costs down.

Network observability also helps spot malicious traffic patterns such as from a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks can be costly, due to the massive bandwidth they consume and damage to customer experience and business reputation. So, speed of detection and resolution is critical. Network observability allows you to be a champ at both reactive and proactive troubleshooting.

Staying Ahead of Rising Egress Costs with Network Visibility 

As network engineers know, the use of cloud applications has grown significantly in recent years. Research from Gartner shows that all cloud segments are on track for double-digit growth in 2025. Ecosystems are expanding, so understanding where all your traffic is going becomes an increasingly valuable problem to solve.

Even though cloud adoption continues to break records, a trend we are also seeing is the migration from cloud back to on-premises infrastructure, particularly among early adopters. The primary drivers of this change are cost savings, improved performance, and control. However, when making this switch, you need a network observability solution that gives you full visibility into your entire network from A to B so you can plan, monitor, and track progress, ensuring that you keep customers and the business happy.

Do you want to learn more about the benefits of a network observability solution? Explore use cases and real-world experiences.