5 ms·

What is best cost effective and decent alternative to DD in 2023? I also feel like they are robbing me blind. Great product though.

stock_toaster 4y ago
Self hosted signoz for opentelemetry? with grafana, prometheus, loki for metrics and logs?
nikolay_sivko 4y ago
Take a look at Coroot: it's open-source, ebpf-powered, and can be integrated in minutes: https://github.com/coroot/coroot https://github.com/coroot/coroot
m-o11y 4y ago
Plug: If you're looking for something a bit more "few-clicks-and-you-are-up-and-running", check out OpsVerse ObserveNow: https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ .. Entirely powered by OSS tools, ingestion-driven pricing, and without the hassle of managing the stack and scaling up. Best of all, can also be run entirely within your own AWS/GCP/Azure so you only pay OpsVerse for maintaining the stack based on your ingestion (and we also monitor the monitoring system for you ;))
ankitnayan 3y ago
An OpenSource alternative to DataDog built on ClickHouse database which is also native to OpenTelemetry https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz
scottfingerhut 3y ago
(disclaimer, I'm with Grafana). We added a lot to our free Grafana Cloud so you can kick it pretty hard (and harder during the first 14 days when everything is beefed up). Free tier comes with 3 Grafana front end users fully managed, backend (with storage) 50gb Loki logs, 50gb Tempo traces, 10k monthly active series prom metrics, IRM/on call, k6 user testing hours and other stuff too. And for the quick solution integrations we made a K8s monitoring solution with out of the box dashboards, KPIs and alerts. Same thing we did with many others. We absolutely have more work to do in simplifying the user experience too.
dineshkumar_cs 3y ago
Use Prometheus or Influx for storing metrics, ELK or Opensearch or loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, and Jaeger for tracing. You would need a team to configure this setup and make it right over time. It's worth the investment instead of paying a cloud market leader.
berkle4455 4y ago
qryn is solid and very affordable because you self-host. it supports DD vectors out of the box. /dev/null is always a strong contender too.
- qxip 4y ago
  Thanks for mentioning qryn! We are a non-corporate alternative and feature full ingestion compatibility with DataDog (including Cloudflare emitters, etc), Loki, Prometheus, Tempo, Elastic & others for both on-prem (https://qryn.dev https://qryn.dev) and Cloud (https://qryn.cloud https://qryn.cloud) deployments, without the killer price tag. Note: in qryn s3/r2 are as close to /dev/null as it gets!
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Are you joking or is there actually a datadog-like startup named dev null?
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    I'm saying most logs are pointless to keep and would be better directed to /dev/null. Keep important transaction related logs and sample the rest. The notion that every single log or metric across your entire technical architecture is worth keeping is one implanted by SaaS providers with a financial interest in naive engineers doing just that.
    - mdmglr 4y ago
      I agree. Many applications log for the hello of it and log unnecessary information. We have concepts of debug, info, warn and error… but I think we need apps to be developed with the concept of log concern. For example take sshd. For infosec they are interested in IP of failed attempts, operations might want to know connection failures, etc.
  - cbeley 4y ago
    Think of it like DataDog 2.0: https://devnull-as-a-service.com/ https://devnull-as-a-service.com/
jongjong 4y ago
Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage. Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser and rarely push back when an engineer suggests a big-name SaaS solution with insane lock-in factor. Nobody seems to care about lock-in these days, it's only when your costs reach almost 100 million and interest rates are going up that you start thinking "Damn, I could have had all that for free if I had planned ahead and resisted all these platform lock-ins and unnecessary proprietary tools..."
- dalyons 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate… but in the meantime. am I doing it wrong? If others are getting kickbacks I want in
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    > we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate… Moving away from those SaaS tools can be extremely painful and a lot more costly due to vendor lock in. In practice, typically, this "let's reevaluate" time never happens. On the other hand, I don't really care. I normally suggest open source tools, but if people want to throw money at some vendor, fine by me.
  - igetspam 4y ago
    I do a lot of negotiating on products like this. The most I've ever gotten was a shirt and some stickers for my kid. Definitely not enough to move the needle on $250k/year deals. I feel like I'm missing out! I love how good DataDog is. It's a great product. Too expensive though. I love most of the people I've worked with at Grafana Cloud but it's a painful product. The price makes up for it though, so we use Grafana Cloud. We may end up with something like signoz, when we have the cycles but the ROI is bad when I already have twice as much work as people and that barely more than KTLO.
honeybadger223 4y ago
Depends on what you want to monitor. Grafana is pretty decent, but the real draw to Datadog is their APM stack. The UI for tracing and looking at stuff is pretty awesome. Though you could get most things into Grafana with something like Prometheus. The problem with Grafana is understanding what the limitations are. If you're not careful with the number of panels and such it can get quite slow. I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough. If you need to monitor some infrastructure you can just use Telegraf and output it to Grafana if needed. It kinda falls apart though because another great benefit of something like Datadog is not managing a time series db. That can get ugly real quick. I guess it all just depends. If my bill was super high I wouldn't mind spending some resources on Prom/Grafana if you're in the Kube space or some Telegraf/InfluxDB if you're not. I've also heard good things about Timescale but haven't used it.
- davkal 3y ago
  > I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough. Hi, I run the Grafana team at Grafana Labs. I'd love to learn more about your Grafonnet use to help us build something better. I'm david at grafana com
- slyall 4y ago
  Depends a lot what sort of scale you are on too. Grafana Cloud will be cheaper than DD but is not quite as end-user friendly. Running it yourself is not too hard up if you are not having to do clustering ( say 1m metric series, 100GB/day logs). But different people have different comfort levels for that. With any monitoring system most of the work is actually making use of the data. Tagging, Alerts, Dashboards and especially onboarding all the teams. You can spend a lot of time and money rolling something out and then barely anybody uses it.
xeromal 4y ago
My small team had to choose between New Relic and DD and I found New Relic's billing model to be more appetizing. It was per seat and you could switch who was in the seat. Unlimited instances and most of the features were covered under that seat besides some extra things like HIPAA / Finance related stuff. They also have "regular" users that are free that can make dashboards and such. DD drove me nuts with their crazy amount of sales calls that just seemed to balloon.
- postpawl 4y ago
  > you could switch who was in the seat For others reading this - you can’t just switch back and forth a few times a week. A full platform user can be moved to a basic user only twice in a 12-month period.
Dopameaner 4y ago
Thoughts on Appdynamics? aernt they DD's competitor.

stock_toaster 4y ago

Self hosted signoz for opentelemetry? with grafana, prometheus, loki for metrics and logs?

nikolay_sivko 4y ago

Take a look at Coroot: it's open-source, ebpf-powered, and can be integrated in minutes: https://github.com/coroot/coroot https://github.com/coroot/coroot

m-o11y 4y ago

Plug: If you're looking for something a bit more "few-clicks-and-you-are-up-and-running", check out OpsVerse ObserveNow: https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ .. Entirely powered by OSS tools, ingestion-driven pricing, and without the hassle of managing the stack and scaling up. Best of all, can also be run entirely within your own AWS/GCP/Azure so you only pay OpsVerse for maintaining the stack based on your ingestion (and we also monitor the monitoring system for you ;))

ankitnayan 3y ago

An OpenSource alternative to DataDog built on ClickHouse database which is also native to OpenTelemetry https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz

scottfingerhut 3y ago

(disclaimer, I'm with Grafana). We added a lot to our free Grafana Cloud so you can kick it pretty hard (and harder during the first 14 days when everything is beefed up). Free tier comes with 3 Grafana front end users fully managed, backend (with storage) 50gb Loki logs, 50gb Tempo traces, 10k monthly active series prom metrics, IRM/on call, k6 user testing hours and other stuff too. And for the quick solution integrations we made a K8s monitoring solution with out of the box dashboards, KPIs and alerts. Same thing we did with many others. We absolutely have more work to do in simplifying the user experience too.

dineshkumar_cs 3y ago

Use Prometheus or Influx for storing metrics, ELK or Opensearch or loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, and Jaeger for tracing. You would need a team to configure this setup and make it right over time. It's worth the investment instead of paying a cloud market leader.

berkle4455 4y ago

qryn is solid and very affordable because you self-host. it supports DD vectors out of the box. /dev/null is always a strong contender too.

qxip 4y ago
Thanks for mentioning qryn! We are a non-corporate alternative and feature full ingestion compatibility with DataDog (including Cloudflare emitters, etc), Loki, Prometheus, Tempo, Elastic & others for both on-prem (https://qryn.dev https://qryn.dev) and Cloud (https://qryn.cloud https://qryn.cloud) deployments, without the killer price tag. Note: in qryn s3/r2 are as close to /dev/null as it gets!
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Are you joking or is there actually a datadog-like startup named dev null?
- berkle4455 4y ago
  I'm saying most logs are pointless to keep and would be better directed to /dev/null. Keep important transaction related logs and sample the rest. The notion that every single log or metric across your entire technical architecture is worth keeping is one implanted by SaaS providers with a financial interest in naive engineers doing just that.
  - mdmglr 4y ago
    I agree. Many applications log for the hello of it and log unnecessary information. We have concepts of debug, info, warn and error… but I think we need apps to be developed with the concept of log concern. For example take sshd. For infosec they are interested in IP of failed attempts, operations might want to know connection failures, etc.
- cbeley 4y ago
  Think of it like DataDog 2.0: https://devnull-as-a-service.com/ https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

jongjong 4y ago

Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage. Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser and rarely push back when an engineer suggests a big-name SaaS solution with insane lock-in factor. Nobody seems to care about lock-in these days, it's only when your costs reach almost 100 million and interest rates are going up that you start thinking "Damn, I could have had all that for free if I had planned ahead and resisted all these platform lock-ins and unnecessary proprietary tools..."

dalyons 4y ago
> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate… but in the meantime. am I doing it wrong? If others are getting kickbacks I want in
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  > we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate… Moving away from those SaaS tools can be extremely painful and a lot more costly due to vendor lock in. In practice, typically, this "let's reevaluate" time never happens. On the other hand, I don't really care. I normally suggest open source tools, but if people want to throw money at some vendor, fine by me.
- igetspam 4y ago
  I do a lot of negotiating on products like this. The most I've ever gotten was a shirt and some stickers for my kid. Definitely not enough to move the needle on $250k/year deals. I feel like I'm missing out! I love how good DataDog is. It's a great product. Too expensive though. I love most of the people I've worked with at Grafana Cloud but it's a painful product. The price makes up for it though, so we use Grafana Cloud. We may end up with something like signoz, when we have the cycles but the ROI is bad when I already have twice as much work as people and that barely more than KTLO.

honeybadger223 4y ago

Depends on what you want to monitor. Grafana is pretty decent, but the real draw to Datadog is their APM stack. The UI for tracing and looking at stuff is pretty awesome. Though you could get most things into Grafana with something like Prometheus. The problem with Grafana is understanding what the limitations are. If you're not careful with the number of panels and such it can get quite slow. I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough. If you need to monitor some infrastructure you can just use Telegraf and output it to Grafana if needed. It kinda falls apart though because another great benefit of something like Datadog is not managing a time series db. That can get ugly real quick. I guess it all just depends. If my bill was super high I wouldn't mind spending some resources on Prom/Grafana if you're in the Kube space or some Telegraf/InfluxDB if you're not. I've also heard good things about Timescale but haven't used it.

davkal 3y ago
> I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough. Hi, I run the Grafana team at Grafana Labs. I'd love to learn more about your Grafonnet use to help us build something better. I'm david at grafana com
slyall 4y ago
Depends a lot what sort of scale you are on too. Grafana Cloud will be cheaper than DD but is not quite as end-user friendly. Running it yourself is not too hard up if you are not having to do clustering ( say 1m metric series, 100GB/day logs). But different people have different comfort levels for that. With any monitoring system most of the work is actually making use of the data. Tagging, Alerts, Dashboards and especially onboarding all the teams. You can spend a lot of time and money rolling something out and then barely anybody uses it.

xeromal 4y ago

My small team had to choose between New Relic and DD and I found New Relic's billing model to be more appetizing. It was per seat and you could switch who was in the seat. Unlimited instances and most of the features were covered under that seat besides some extra things like HIPAA / Finance related stuff. They also have "regular" users that are free that can make dashboards and such. DD drove me nuts with their crazy amount of sales calls that just seemed to balloon.

postpawl 4y ago
> you could switch who was in the seat For others reading this - you can’t just switch back and forth a few times a week. A full platform user can be moved to a basic user only twice in a 12-month period.

Dopameaner 4y ago

Thoughts on Appdynamics? aernt they DD's competitor.