When my team was forced to use it a few years ago it was order of magnitude more expensive than diy prometheus/grafana while being less friendly to devs - their metric query language absolutely sucked. Was more friendly to non-devs who liked pretty ui tho…

We also had some collector troubles and support basically did nothing but wasted our time in calls repeatedly

Managed services are always more expensive than DIY FWIW. You're paying to make running the product someone else's problem.

That is why DIY is usually more expensive than managed services. Engineering hours are expensive and best spent on your core competencies.

DIY only make sense at a very small scale or very large scale, everything in between is usually best offloaded to those which do it as their core competency.

I would caution against sweeping generalizations like that. In this case “diy” part is basically just configuration management which with dd you will have to do anyway. And sure they make it slightly easier by providing defaults for most things but Prometheus/grafana do a decent job at it too.

More broadly I’ve never used managed service that would “just work” and wouldn’t require substantial configuration and often times bunch of workarounds but maybe those exist

At every single org I've been where Datadog has been considered, the conclusion has been "Yes, it would be cool, but we really can't justify the price."

Yes, in theory, in the middle scale, you should outsource things, but in practice, it only works if the managed service is at the right price.

Why does DIY make sense at very small scale IYO?

It seems like very small scale has the highest leverage of utility-priced services (and often fits into free tiers of many).

We were not at a scale where you would want to hire dedicated observability expert but with their pricing it totally made sense. My guess is their play is to get in early and get you locked in gud

They have a good product, but no matter how good it is, after the experience I had with their sales, I will never use the service again.

their sales is abysmal. i have a new account manager every 6 months that wants to schedule a meeting. they put stuff on proposed contracts where they don’t even offer a discount.

just terrible.

imo they should drastically simplify their billing dimensions so a simple human can understand it. for a certain size of company it just makes no sense to need to be engaged with a sales teams.

They're overly aggressive and the cold calls to my personal cell mean I'll avoid their product whenever I'm in a decision making role.

would you mind elaborating a little bit on what happened?

Signed up for their service to get visibility into our infrastructure; we're a small company with a big setup. They bill hourly, but we do a lot of small instances that run for a few minutes at a time. Twelve instances running 3 minutes each is billed as 12 hours of monitoring.

We approached them to see if they would work with us on reducing the massive bill that resulted. They agreed to cut it by 50% if we signed up for additional services. I'm not talking about a future volume discount; we were working with them for a good faith credit once we discovered the mismatch with their billing model (we had already filtered out those instance types)

Objectively, we owed the money. However, every other vendor I've run into works with small companies like ours without resorting to those kinds of tactics, so it's a pretty terrible look for them.

Not only do they cold call people's personal phones, they do it after being told no. In all of their communication, they are pushy and give off used car salesman vibes.

I have no experience with sales but I always wonder what kind of incentives these people are given to take such draconian measures. Are they acting like stalkers because they get a fat commission check or is it typically do to something else?

They need to meet a quota. But also commission paid.

When it works, it is awesome.

But there are some caveats. Facets can break in unexpected ways and the last time you want to be dealing with this is when you're dealing with a fire in production.

Agreed. I had the same experience though as many others when it comes to Sales. I understand it is a complex product but they couldn't demo me anything even after 2 meetings. They wanted a 3rd meeting for the demo even though I made it clear on the 1st meeting that I am only interested in specific products (log monitoring etc) and would be good to see a demo in 2nd meeting.

Too much friction in their sales process. But I guess I am not the target audience.

Re: not target audience — I think you're right, I am also part of that cohort (speaking as an engineer at least).

This is one of the reasons why I steer away from anything that requires a demo. If an org can't present even a read-only interactive version of the product, then it likely means that there is a KPI/OKR-heavy pitch intended for management or non-engineering business stakeholders to hear (of which the upselling you alluded to is a part).

The majority of the (F)OSS alternatives out there can be demo'ed with little-to-no engineering lift from prospective users. This is meaningful for the adoption story because it creates bottom-up pressure to internally pitch to relevant stakeholders— a much more powerful tool than external pitches. The fact that Datadog seems either unwilling or incapable of doing this historically, while touting one of the more expensive products in that particular vertical, suggests that the product value-add may not speak for itself (at least to a significant subset of engineers).

Are you kidding? It's visual vomit and takes 3-4 clicks to get to relevant data. The only "great" thing about it could be the tracing but something you can easily get with OpenTracing/Jaeger. I have to use Datadog daily and sorely miss Grafana.

I love searching and faceting in the logs and building quick charts off of measures within the results... so easy to find things and drill into problems.

Man ya'll would love Splunk then. Shame it costs so much