3 ms·

AWS drops price for managed Prometheus service by 84%

47 points by markcartertm 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago
The GitHub survey showed that datadog is eating Prometheus market share very quickly.
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  Links?
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Considering that one is free and that the other is not cheap, I'd like to see some data demonstrating this since common sense would dictate otherwise.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Nothing is actually free And the customers for this are businesses. Businesses spend money. (as opposed to what a lot of developers think)
    - igetspam 5y ago
      You can get into a lot of financial trouble with DD custom metrics, very quickly. We're talking easy five figure bills in a few days. I love datadog and appreciate how quickly their team will teach out and tell you you have a runaway bill but there's not a world in which I think the custom metrics pricing makes it usable. They know it too and they have customers that do clever thinks to use them in bursts. Prometheus is good and with AWS driving the price down, I'll be poking it tomorrow.
bpodgursky 5y ago
Some Product Managers must be having a really bad day. AWS is usually super secret about the profit margin on their various cloud services, but now we know that the margin on Prometheus was at least 84%...
- genbit 5y ago
  doesn't have to be, they could sustain losses and count it as a marketing expense.
  - bogdanu 5y ago
    How is this even legal? Afaik in EU this kind of business practices are illegal.
    - ghshephard 5y ago
      American and European competition laws are very different. In the United States - the thing that gets close attention is any attempt to coordinate to increase prices, even if that results in increased competition. Decreasing prices to reduce competition gets a pass over here.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- m00x 5y ago
  Not necessarily. They might be doing this to get more customers on it since they're losing to Datadog. Amazon has a long history of being willing to eat a ton of loss to kill competition like in the very popular diapers.com business.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    They have me interested. Datadog does a far better job with logs but their CM product is wildly expensive. Happy to let someone else run Prometheus for me.
- jpdb 5y ago
  I used to work at AWS and I have no first hand knowledge in this case, but would guess it's far more likely that the engineering teams figured out a way to run it cheaper than at launch, and passed that savings along to customers.
omeze 5y ago
Prometheus clusters/scaling/federation can be challenging to manage at scale, but Im a but surprised at how relatively popular Datadog is given its price and how feature rich prometheus is. Does anyone here have experience with both? Prometheus strikes me as one of the most amazing recent pieces of open source tech, the query language in particular (while hard to grok for beginners) was such an eye opener early in my career. It has its warts but infinite kudos to the creators.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  Yeah used both in prod and was pondering the same question. On top of that dd was ridiculously expensive and resource hungry in kubernetes environment. I’m biased though bc i used the prometheus inspiration extensively at google. For someone who doesn’t use as many custom metrics (which I suspect are most orgs out there) dd is probably superior bc it gets the job done (mostly) and has ok ui
- macNchz 5y ago
  I have really wanted to get a Prometheus into production for several years and have tried a few times, but working at small startups without dedicated ops people I‘ve found myself mucking around too much trying to get the metrics that I really care about wired up, whereas Datadog “just works”. Datadog’s pricing gives me a bit of indigestion but it’s pretty slick.
- singron 5y ago
  Having used Monarch at Google (basically an explicit relational algebra for a query language), the fixed-function query "language" for DataDog is truly sad. It seems that prometheus made similar mistakes to borgmon in terms of designing a quirky query language, but at least it has one. For an example of annoying behavior in datadog: * Zoom in on any chart with default_zero. Eventually the spaces between the points will go to zero. You have to add a rollup whenever you use default_zero to avoid this. * In general, you have very little control over interpolation, which is a very important part of aggregating and graphing. * exclude_null will remove any series with any null label. You can't write arbitrary filters on series labels. * Label names and values have to be the same to match. E.g. you can't join 2 metrics where different labels have the same value. * The GUI doesn't support a lot of the features, e.g. timeshift. * The available functions often can't be composed. E.g. you can't min by X and then sum. I have a ton of complaints about the GUI too (e.g. it's broken by typing too fast), but I'll save those for later.
stees 5y ago
Did they switch to VM? https://docs.victoriametrics.com/SampleSizeCalculations.html https://docs.victoriametrics.com/SampleSizeCalculations.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
readonthegoapp 5y ago
because of the Grafana licensing restriction?

47 points by markcartertm 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago

The GitHub survey showed that datadog is eating Prometheus market share very quickly.

nine_zeros 5y ago
Links?
speed_spread 5y ago
Considering that one is free and that the other is not cheap, I'd like to see some data demonstrating this since common sense would dictate otherwise.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Nothing is actually free And the customers for this are businesses. Businesses spend money. (as opposed to what a lot of developers think)
  - igetspam 5y ago
    You can get into a lot of financial trouble with DD custom metrics, very quickly. We're talking easy five figure bills in a few days. I love datadog and appreciate how quickly their team will teach out and tell you you have a runaway bill but there's not a world in which I think the custom metrics pricing makes it usable. They know it too and they have customers that do clever thinks to use them in bursts. Prometheus is good and with AWS driving the price down, I'll be poking it tomorrow.

bpodgursky 5y ago

Some Product Managers must be having a really bad day. AWS is usually super secret about the profit margin on their various cloud services, but now we know that the margin on Prometheus was at least 84%...

genbit 5y ago
doesn't have to be, they could sustain losses and count it as a marketing expense.
- bogdanu 5y ago
  How is this even legal? Afaik in EU this kind of business practices are illegal.
  - ghshephard 5y ago
    American and European competition laws are very different. In the United States - the thing that gets close attention is any attempt to coordinate to increase prices, even if that results in increased competition. Decreasing prices to reduce competition gets a pass over here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
m00x 5y ago
Not necessarily. They might be doing this to get more customers on it since they're losing to Datadog. Amazon has a long history of being willing to eat a ton of loss to kill competition like in the very popular diapers.com business.
- igetspam 5y ago
  They have me interested. Datadog does a far better job with logs but their CM product is wildly expensive. Happy to let someone else run Prometheus for me.
jpdb 5y ago
I used to work at AWS and I have no first hand knowledge in this case, but would guess it's far more likely that the engineering teams figured out a way to run it cheaper than at launch, and passed that savings along to customers.

omeze 5y ago

Prometheus clusters/scaling/federation can be challenging to manage at scale, but Im a but surprised at how relatively popular Datadog is given its price and how feature rich prometheus is. Does anyone here have experience with both? Prometheus strikes me as one of the most amazing recent pieces of open source tech, the query language in particular (while hard to grok for beginners) was such an eye opener early in my career. It has its warts but infinite kudos to the creators.

dilyevsky 5y ago
Yeah used both in prod and was pondering the same question. On top of that dd was ridiculously expensive and resource hungry in kubernetes environment. I’m biased though bc i used the prometheus inspiration extensively at google. For someone who doesn’t use as many custom metrics (which I suspect are most orgs out there) dd is probably superior bc it gets the job done (mostly) and has ok ui
macNchz 5y ago
I have really wanted to get a Prometheus into production for several years and have tried a few times, but working at small startups without dedicated ops people I‘ve found myself mucking around too much trying to get the metrics that I really care about wired up, whereas Datadog “just works”. Datadog’s pricing gives me a bit of indigestion but it’s pretty slick.
singron 5y ago
Having used Monarch at Google (basically an explicit relational algebra for a query language), the fixed-function query "language" for DataDog is truly sad. It seems that prometheus made similar mistakes to borgmon in terms of designing a quirky query language, but at least it has one. For an example of annoying behavior in datadog: * Zoom in on any chart with default_zero. Eventually the spaces between the points will go to zero. You have to add a rollup whenever you use default_zero to avoid this. * In general, you have very little control over interpolation, which is a very important part of aggregating and graphing. * exclude_null will remove any series with any null label. You can't write arbitrary filters on series labels. * Label names and values have to be the same to match. E.g. you can't join 2 metrics where different labels have the same value. * The GUI doesn't support a lot of the features, e.g. timeshift. * The available functions often can't be composed. E.g. you can't min by X and then sum. I have a ton of complaints about the GUI too (e.g. it's broken by typing too fast), but I'll save those for later.

stees 5y ago

Did they switch to VM? https://docs.victoriametrics.com/SampleSizeCalculations.html https://docs.victoriametrics.com/SampleSizeCalculations.html

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

readonthegoapp 5y ago

because of the Grafana licensing restriction?