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Uhhh. The point of OTel is that you can host it yourself. And should do imho unless you're part of a VC money laundering scheme where they want to puff up NR or

Uhhh. The point of OTel is that you can host it yourself. And should do imho unless you're part of a VC money laundering scheme where they want to puff up NR or DD or whoever portfolio company numbers.

rbanffy 1y ago
You should always think about how much it'll cost for you to roll out and maintain something vs how much it would cost to buy the service from a vendor. Chances are your volumes are low enough it will be actually cheaper to run with something like New Relic or Datadog. When the monthly bill starts reaching 10% of what a dedicated person would cost, it's time to plan your move to self-hosted.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  > it's time to plan your move to self-hosted. No, it's always time to plan the move to self hosted, and just occasionally choose someone else to be the "self." Because once a proprietary vendor gets in the stack, evicting them is going to be a project I'm aware that this doesn't split cleanly down the "saas only feature" or the evil "rug pull" axes, but I'd much rather say "I legitimately tried to allow us to eject from the walled garden and the world changed" versus "whaddya mean non-Datadog?"
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    > once a proprietary vendor gets in the stack, evicting them is going to be a project Only if the application is poorly architected. The border between the app and the service should be clearly defined and easy to change. That’s true for core services as well as things like log and metrics collection.
    - aitchnyu 1y ago
      Datadog libraries encourage you to enrich the telemetry with context like "trying to get payment" etc. Should we avoid it completely or can we abstract it away or ask an LLM to do the tedious task?
      - rbanffy 1y ago
        Most of this is present on all alternatives. You might want to have all your logging, telemetry, etc on a separate module so that you have all the functions that call into the specific APIs in one single place.
_ea1k 1y ago
In my experience, the people willing to pay the most to not host it themselves are often the big companies that are long past VC money. They'll gladly pay someone to do it and have a big team of engineers and planners to support the outsourcing. Efficiency isn't what bigco inc is about.
- xyzzy123 1y ago
  BigCos have seen teams come and go, whole departments slaughtered by reorgs. They have seen weird policy changes, political battles, personal beefs and bad managers that trigger waves of attrition. They know that even if you have the capacity to run something internally today, that is a delicate state of affairs that could easily change tomorrow.

rbanffy 1y ago

You should always think about how much it'll cost for you to roll out and maintain something vs how much it would cost to buy the service from a vendor. Chances are your volumes are low enough it will be actually cheaper to run with something like New Relic or Datadog. When the monthly bill starts reaching 10% of what a dedicated person would cost, it's time to plan your move to self-hosted.

mdaniel 1y ago
> it's time to plan your move to self-hosted. No, it's always time to plan the move to self hosted, and just occasionally choose someone else to be the "self." Because once a proprietary vendor gets in the stack, evicting them is going to be a project I'm aware that this doesn't split cleanly down the "saas only feature" or the evil "rug pull" axes, but I'd much rather say "I legitimately tried to allow us to eject from the walled garden and the world changed" versus "whaddya mean non-Datadog?"
- rbanffy 1y ago
  > once a proprietary vendor gets in the stack, evicting them is going to be a project Only if the application is poorly architected. The border between the app and the service should be clearly defined and easy to change. That’s true for core services as well as things like log and metrics collection.
  - aitchnyu 1y ago
    Datadog libraries encourage you to enrich the telemetry with context like "trying to get payment" etc. Should we avoid it completely or can we abstract it away or ask an LLM to do the tedious task?
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      Most of this is present on all alternatives. You might want to have all your logging, telemetry, etc on a separate module so that you have all the functions that call into the specific APIs in one single place.

_ea1k 1y ago

In my experience, the people willing to pay the most to not host it themselves are often the big companies that are long past VC money. They'll gladly pay someone to do it and have a big team of engineers and planners to support the outsourcing. Efficiency isn't what bigco inc is about.

xyzzy123 1y ago
BigCos have seen teams come and go, whole departments slaughtered by reorgs. They have seen weird policy changes, political battles, personal beefs and bad managers that trigger waves of attrition. They know that even if you have the capacity to run something internally today, that is a delicate state of affairs that could easily change tomorrow.