4 ms·

Wondered the same. Assume this is a threat to their business? An open source competitor can do something cool so they want to kill the functionality?

hosh 4y ago
We use DD, and we have to use Otel for our Elixir apps to ingest spans into DD because there are no DD SDKs for Elixir or Erlang. From the perspective of a customer, I can tell you that DD already has quite a bit of a moat. Their main competitive advantage, and what got us into using it, is being able to correlate data across APM, custom metrics, and logging through the use of tagging. They then densely link data together across the platform. There is also a built-in Jupyter-style notebooks. By correlating data like that, you get more value out of ingesting as much data into DD as you can. There are some additional services we're not using, such as auto-correlation with ML (and alerting for anomaly detection), and security monitoring that also looks across the entire platform using their ML tech. Like AWS/GCP/Azure, it can get expensive, quite fast, using on-demand pricing, so there are negotiated annual contracts. Right now, our team is small, and to replicate the functionality we do use, using self-hosted open-source tooling, we might as well hire another engineer for just setting up and maintaining such a platform. I get it that, you want to defend the moat and that eroding the little things can lead to eroding the big things. As I see it though, if you need those correlations, you'll need a certain scale and team size before it makes sense to build out something like that for yourself.
- aeyes 4y ago
  > negotiated annual contract Maybe we are too small but Datadog is one of the few vendors which we haven't been able to negotiate down in years. The price has always been whats on the website. I honestly don't even mind, with some vendors it feels like you are on a basar and they always tell you that their final discountns had to get approval by the CEO.
  - hosh 4y ago
    I don't know if we got a discount for an annual contract, or if the annual contract pricing was published on the website. But we were able to work out things like, using seasonal pricing because our traffic is seasonal.
  - slyall 4y ago
    I always tell people looking at Datadog to remember "DDDD" or "DataDog Don't Discount". Compared to most Enterprise vendors it is a lot harder to get a discount from Datadog. Most vendors will give you 1/3 off just for signing a contract and committing to a spend, Datadog is not like that.
    - shyn3 4y ago
      Just show them New Relics new pricing
      - wink 4y ago
        the New Relic who either had a breach they never notified me or sold my email address? I've getting random spam to newrelic@<domain> for years now. Nope, they'll never see any money if I can avoid it.
  - Hawxy 4y ago
    > Maybe we are too small but Datadog is one of the few vendors which we haven't been able to negotiate down in years. We spend a few thousand a month with Datadog and our account manager reaches out every quarter to adjust our monthly commit up/down which provides a 20% discount (I think) or so off from the website prices.
    - ChrisCooneyUK 4y ago
      [dead]
- pranay01 4y ago
  you may want to check out https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz I am one of the maintainers. We are building a DataDog alternative with native support for opentelemetry.
  - hosh 4y ago
    I have seen it around, but didn't know it was open source. If you guys are working on correlation, then I will definitely be watching this. Consistent link urls that can be shared is also useful. Hopefully someone else will contribute the notebooks feature. Those are very useful. Something that DD is not careful about, is being able to consistently use UTC for all time labels in all graphs (and maybe a quick way to convert to a local time if we need to communicate with stakeholders). (I don't know why your comment was downvoted).
    - pranay01 4y ago
      Yeah, we are actively working on correlation. We have metrics, traces and logs in a single app - so we should be able to provide a seamless correlation. Thanks for the point about Notebooks, we have not thought in detail on how people use that. Is it primarily to collaborate between team members when an incident happens or even when there is no incident, and you are analysing stuff
      - hosh 4y ago
        We have used those notebooks for: - Incidents, collecting different metrics and showing them next to each other, with comments - Longer-term reliability debugging. They can form a kind of ad-hoc dashboard. These are usually issues that degrade performance, don't have immediate or wide-spread customer impact, and are things we are not immediately able to detect - Related, performance tuning. Sometimes, the key metric is unknown. We want to explore it, and then make changes to infra, and then see if that moved the needle - Sometimes, the ad-hoc widgets are useful enough to export to a dashboard - I can take any widget anywhere else and import it into a notebook, or start a new notebook out of it. The notebooks are similar to the dashboard, just that, the layout engine only allows a linear notebook layout instead of a grid. There are already text widgets, though the button to add that is easier to access. Other than the comments, it's basically a dashboard with the UI changed so that it feels like a notebook. Keep in mind too, all dashboard and notebooks modify timestamps and other states in the browser URL, so it is easy for me to copy-paste those into Slack so that other people can see what I am seeing.
- harpratap 4y ago
  Their data correlation is awful compared to competitors like Honeycomb, Dynatrace and Instana. What we want to see is something that cuts through all the noisy data and show the users what anomalies are occurring. We shouldn't be sifting through bunch of outdated dashboards and notebooks in this day and age

hosh 4y ago

We use DD, and we have to use Otel for our Elixir apps to ingest spans into DD because there are no DD SDKs for Elixir or Erlang. From the perspective of a customer, I can tell you that DD already has quite a bit of a moat. Their main competitive advantage, and what got us into using it, is being able to correlate data across APM, custom metrics, and logging through the use of tagging. They then densely link data together across the platform. There is also a built-in Jupyter-style notebooks. By correlating data like that, you get more value out of ingesting as much data into DD as you can. There are some additional services we're not using, such as auto-correlation with ML (and alerting for anomaly detection), and security monitoring that also looks across the entire platform using their ML tech. Like AWS/GCP/Azure, it can get expensive, quite fast, using on-demand pricing, so there are negotiated annual contracts. Right now, our team is small, and to replicate the functionality we do use, using self-hosted open-source tooling, we might as well hire another engineer for just setting up and maintaining such a platform. I get it that, you want to defend the moat and that eroding the little things can lead to eroding the big things. As I see it though, if you need those correlations, you'll need a certain scale and team size before it makes sense to build out something like that for yourself.

aeyes 4y ago
> negotiated annual contract Maybe we are too small but Datadog is one of the few vendors which we haven't been able to negotiate down in years. The price has always been whats on the website. I honestly don't even mind, with some vendors it feels like you are on a basar and they always tell you that their final discountns had to get approval by the CEO.
- hosh 4y ago
  I don't know if we got a discount for an annual contract, or if the annual contract pricing was published on the website. But we were able to work out things like, using seasonal pricing because our traffic is seasonal.
- slyall 4y ago
  I always tell people looking at Datadog to remember "DDDD" or "DataDog Don't Discount". Compared to most Enterprise vendors it is a lot harder to get a discount from Datadog. Most vendors will give you 1/3 off just for signing a contract and committing to a spend, Datadog is not like that.
  - shyn3 4y ago
    Just show them New Relics new pricing
    - wink 4y ago
      the New Relic who either had a breach they never notified me or sold my email address? I've getting random spam to newrelic@<domain> for years now. Nope, they'll never see any money if I can avoid it.
- Hawxy 4y ago
  > Maybe we are too small but Datadog is one of the few vendors which we haven't been able to negotiate down in years. We spend a few thousand a month with Datadog and our account manager reaches out every quarter to adjust our monthly commit up/down which provides a 20% discount (I think) or so off from the website prices.
  - ChrisCooneyUK 4y ago
    [dead]
pranay01 4y ago
you may want to check out https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz I am one of the maintainers. We are building a DataDog alternative with native support for opentelemetry.
- hosh 4y ago
  I have seen it around, but didn't know it was open source. If you guys are working on correlation, then I will definitely be watching this. Consistent link urls that can be shared is also useful. Hopefully someone else will contribute the notebooks feature. Those are very useful. Something that DD is not careful about, is being able to consistently use UTC for all time labels in all graphs (and maybe a quick way to convert to a local time if we need to communicate with stakeholders). (I don't know why your comment was downvoted).
  - pranay01 4y ago
    Yeah, we are actively working on correlation. We have metrics, traces and logs in a single app - so we should be able to provide a seamless correlation. Thanks for the point about Notebooks, we have not thought in detail on how people use that. Is it primarily to collaborate between team members when an incident happens or even when there is no incident, and you are analysing stuff
    - hosh 4y ago
      We have used those notebooks for: - Incidents, collecting different metrics and showing them next to each other, with comments - Longer-term reliability debugging. They can form a kind of ad-hoc dashboard. These are usually issues that degrade performance, don't have immediate or wide-spread customer impact, and are things we are not immediately able to detect - Related, performance tuning. Sometimes, the key metric is unknown. We want to explore it, and then make changes to infra, and then see if that moved the needle - Sometimes, the ad-hoc widgets are useful enough to export to a dashboard - I can take any widget anywhere else and import it into a notebook, or start a new notebook out of it. The notebooks are similar to the dashboard, just that, the layout engine only allows a linear notebook layout instead of a grid. There are already text widgets, though the button to add that is easier to access. Other than the comments, it's basically a dashboard with the UI changed so that it feels like a notebook. Keep in mind too, all dashboard and notebooks modify timestamps and other states in the browser URL, so it is easy for me to copy-paste those into Slack so that other people can see what I am seeing.
harpratap 4y ago
Their data correlation is awful compared to competitors like Honeycomb, Dynatrace and Instana. What we want to see is something that cuts through all the noisy data and show the users what anomalies are occurring. We shouldn't be sifting through bunch of outdated dashboards and notebooks in this day and age