Gotta say though, having rolled grafana and prometheus and such on my own plenty of times before, if you are a startup and can afford Datadog, use Datadog.
No thanks. :/
Looking at the pricing page the cost $15/instance so $37,500
Middle-of-the-road developer salary is like $35k in most of Europe, outside of the capitals.
Although it does say: "Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo). Contact us." at the bottom, so I guess 500 is a lot.
Spending a fraction of that to monitor that sort of infrastructure is absolutely justified. I can tell you from experience that datadog gives discount even for 100+ hosts, I don't know what they can do for 2500, but if it were me I wouldn't accept anything less than 50% off.
Honestly you need to forgot about your salary, it's irrelevant when it comes to running a company. Imagine a driver in a shipping company deciding to deliver on a scooter rather than a truck because the truck is worth more than his yearly salary.
I guess the point I am driving at here is that there's such a thing as "business critical costs" (IE: can we ship our product or not) which is the majority of infra costs we have today, and then there's "optimisation costs".
Usually when we discuss things like optimisation costs its along the lines of: "Will this product save us enough time to justify it's expense". Often, sadly, the answer is no.
Terraform Enterprise is an example of a time where we said: Yes. -- because the API allows us to deploy CI/CD jobs which provision little versions of our infrastructure, saving us many man-days of time in provisioning and testing every year.
As eluded to in the sibling thread, there's almost no way that we can save 3 or more peoples worth of time every year, we're 3 people right now and we have metrics collection, log tracing and alerting already. -- so it's a hard sell to the business types.
Monitoring and logging are business critical. It's an integral part of infrastructure and it is very normal to spend 10% there. It's really not possible to operate stably and efficiently at a large scale like that without a trove of tooling.
Tools usually justify their costs by allowing to optimize the infra and helping to prevent/fix outages, though not all companies care about stability or hardware costs.
And it's not a choice of free vs paid. open source software costs a lot of money too, pairs of large instances to run it don't come cheap, they're probably more than a salary too if the company wants to have any sort of redundancy or geographic distribution.
May I ask what do you have for logging? I guess you must be screaming in horror at the price of elasticsearch/kibana/splunk :D
Zabbix is the weak link here for sure, but the monitoring is quite comprehensive.
Also, of course their salary is relevant. The cost of an engineer's time is an important factor to consider when making build vs buy decisions. Usually it's one that argues in favor of "buy", but not always.
Add 10% support fees, EBS storage for the OS, bandwidth fees and it's quite a bit more.
If they've got a thousand of hosts, the costs of the infrastructure itself must dwarf the salary of any developer by orders of magnitude, the salary of a developer is simply irrelevant when it comes to acquiring software/hardware.
This is true, but my comment was an offhanded way to say that my "salary" (as in, the one on my contracts and the one I "see") is less than a month of Datadog for our number of hosts.
As for the rest of your comment, I wish it was true.
Developer salaries outside of the capitals is quite low in Europe, and even inside the capitals only go to "near double"
So, instead of 12x it becomes 6x developer costs per annum, which is a fair whack of money.
For me to justify spending "3-6" peoples worth of money it had better save "3-6" peoples worth of time.
Well, it does in my experience, especially if you have to handle 2000+ hosts, that's some serious infra there, need serious tooling.
May I ask which country is it?
Some industries need a lot of hardware because they crunch a lot of data but they aren't software companies. Think Computer graphics rendering.
Paying a FTE salary for software is crazy for them. I would love to see a ration of developers/infrastructure per industry/company.
At a certain scale, rolling your own monitoring and alerting becomes cost effective again as Datadog begins to charge an arm and a leg. I've seen Datadog bills that could easily pay for 2 full time engineers.
Rolling a custom Prometheus / Grafana / Alertmanager setup is not hard at all, more powerful, and it's much easier to do it right from the start.
Which means the companies are running thousands of hosts. So they definitely need both datadog and a full team of sysadmin/devops/SRE to handle that infrastructure.
Disclaimer: I work at Sumo Logic.
It's meaningless to look at the price of Datadog@5 hosts -- at 500 or 5000, you're paying a completely detached number from the website list price, likely a small fraction.
You'll also experience their habit of launching new features, waiting a while for customers to adopt them, then starting to charge extra for them.
Don't get me wrong, Datadog has great products. But they're also great at extracting money from their customers.
You can be small with Prometheus and grow into needing an FTE for it - w/o having the migration hurdle of moving out-source to in-source
We run Prometheus in production and this hasn't been our experience at all.
A single machine can easily handle hundreds of thousands of time series, performance is good, and maintaining the alerting rules is a shared responsibility for the entire team (as it should be).
If you use it as a store for all time series data generated by your business, and you want to have indefinite or very-long-term storage, managing prometheus does become a challenge. (hence m3, chronosphere, endless other companies and tech built to scale the backend of prometheus).
IMO, this is a misuse of the technology, but a lot of unicorn startups have invested a lot of engineering resources into using it this way. And a lot of new companies are using it this way; hence the "one engineer's FT job".
After that, we needed some more effort to scale out horizontally with Thanos, but again, once it's set up, it maintains itself.