Excuse my for rolling my eyes at DHH complaining about the price of software. It's enterprise software. You saw the price when you signed up. DD isn't cheap. Ne

Excuse my for rolling my eyes at DHH complaining about the price of software. It's enterprise software. You saw the price when you signed up. DD isn't cheap. Neither are the direct competitors (have you looked at Splunk licenses lately?). Why is the cost so high? Because it's easy to add logging in places it isn't needed or useful. Every place I've ever worked has been able to save costs on these licenses by taking a pass at cleaning up their logs. If you pay by volume and you're logging things that aren't useful and never ever ever get read, you're burning cash. And if you think you're not doing this, I promise you probably are. DD (and others') costs can be reasonable if you don't just spray log data at it indiscriminately. Want it for cheap? Cloudwatch is pennies compared to DD. It's not good, but it works. Want something faster or more featureful? You can stand up ElasticSearch or your favorite log aggregation software, and then you're probably paying a substantial percentage of what you paid for DD in server costs and time required to keep the thing plugging along. And then whatever time you spend dealing with "Grafana started timing out and we don't know why" and similar flavors of incidents. Yes, good software costs about as much as a FTE. Because you'll (hopefully!) save about a FTE's worth of value by using the tool.