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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Datadog has a great product. I only wish I hadn't had such negative experiences with their sales team.

Yes.... We originally switched to Datadog because we were looking for New Relic alternative, ran across them, signed up for a trial, liked it, the end.

But then like....18 months later we got contacted by our brand new "account manager", who pestered us into a conference call (a bad start!), and then exhibited a simply amazing lack of knowledge of us, our history with Datadog, our current plan and usage, how we're using Datadog, what features we are already using, what features we might find useful, what features Datadog is planning on adding, what features Datadog already has, or indeed, literally anything else about the company they allegedly worked for or the product they were apparently trying to sell.

I was literally telling this sales person "hey, I see you have this feature; it costs a bit more money, but it might solve a problem we have, can you explain to us why we should give your company more money for this feature", and we got so sidetracked trying to explain to the sales person how their own product worked that we never actually got an answer. And that was that; never heard from them again.

I really like Datadog, but it was easily the most frustrating and confusing experience I've ever had talking to a sales person. "Hey, you guys just posted a news article saying Datadog now solves problem X, we have problem X, can you explain how we can give you money in exchange for solving problem X?" Apparently not!

Still love the product, but man, my interactions with them have not been great. (Other than the one disasterous meeting with our account manager, we also have had mixed luck talking to support. They solved the problem eventually, but both times it ended up taking way, WAY more back and forth to get to the bottom of it than I would have expected.)

Seems like they share a playbook with newrelic actually. Such a terrible experience, don't make being a customer a pain in my ass.

If you‘d like to avoid that, have a look at Instana. None of that outrageous pricing, and the focus is actually more about helping you find issues instead of Graph Porn.

Note that I used to work there, so I’m biased.

>instead of Graph Porn

Thank You. These two words alone describe something I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with these products. Far too much focus on Graphs.

Hilarious story as it sounded like the salesperson really followed his/her script quite religiously, which is quite unfortunate. I’d expect account managers to listen more than to talk but in general, most do not.

I'll never try the product for that reason. They spammed me at work, then on LinkedIn, then cold-called my cellphone [which I really hate to be called on by anyone I don't know]. I demanded to be taken off their contact list, and then said they would.

So then a few days later, the same guy called my home phone. I was a bit less polite that time, and perhaps I got my message across, or perhaps he's just run out of ways to try to contact me.

Datadog, you really blew it.

How’d he get your home number?

I don't know about this person, but my name is pretty unique

Enter it into Google and my (former) home number is a click away. And it's only former because I don't have a home phone anymore

There are services that round up all this information and link it that I'm sure sales people would use as well

Yes, there are companies who sell their app which is just a database of contact information and a plugin to link it,

Who knows where those companies got it, but you can sleep soundly knowing you bought it from a “Real company.”

I am pretty sure they are getting it from linkedin. I felt like a conspiracy theorist but I signed myself up for a SIP line and started getting calls on it from Datadog and The Register after I added it to linkedin.

I've never tried Datadog, and I've anti-promoted them at my company because of this.

They somehow scraped my work email from somewhere (only company that managed this so far) and started contacting me once a month with a typical sales pitch.

First one I ignored. Second one I politely emailed back to not contact me. Third one I went through their website and found a data-privacy reporting link, and seemed to get a person that promised that I would be unsubscribed. Fourth one I reported to their DPO that I was invoking my EU rights and requesting that they delete my email address and any other data about me, they apologised and I didnt get an email the next month!...

...The fifth one I reported to my countries GDPR authorities for unauthorised marketing without consent along with copies of all my attempts to get them to stop. That seems to have done it, but I didn't follow-up if that was the nail in the coffin or if they've just given up

Somehow how they got my phone number and started cold calling me once a week for about 3 months before they gave up.

I'll never use Datadog for that reason.

Try Mongodb sales! Those guys were the sleaziest SAAS i have ever dealt with. Not only they constantly called, they messaged to everyone from my company that are my linkedin connection stating they are working with me while it was not the case.

Incredibly annoying LinkedIn doesn’t have the ability block everyone from a specific org. Definitely would pay for an open source tool that does this with my LinkedIn creds.

Presumably they'd just set up a fake profile.

Their spam is one of the worst. They also called a college (unsolicited, of course) and pretended they knew me to get to me. I'll never buy anything from them,

I actually had the opposite experience. Datadog sales team was a breath of fresh air after dealing with New Relic's team.

It was like pulling teeth trying to get pricing for New Relic APM but Datadog reps came with a ton of pricing info

Agreed. NewRelic blew it with us. Simple questions and they always wanted a conference call and never actually answered the questions. We checked out DataDog and explained I was happy with the list prices and please don’t bother me. So far so good.

Yeah, my experience has been similar. We are finally migrating our monitoring/alerting off of DataDog and directly onto CloudWatch because their sales team refused to budge on pricing and demanded the inclusion of features we weren't interested in. That, and they are nowhere near supporting GovCloud environments.

This is part of the product. They are trying to do the impossible, embrace all customer configurations, and failing badly when it comes to the support.

In my experience, it was more than that - it was strong arming by sales.

Depends on the sales guys, I guess. We set a hard budget limit and then harassed support and sales to keep us within this limit.

Anyway. We used Datadog for almost half a year already. Looks like they are overcomplicating their offer to the point of no-return.

Time to look for the next market disruptor.

My experience was getting on a call with them where they explained how their new pricing strategy was going to be so much cheaper and great for us and having them present a nice break down showing exactly how. Eventually we asked "say what's this bit at the end here about a marginal cost per metric+tag permutation?" And it was only after this prompting did we find out that given our current and projected usage profile, we were going to end up spending like 20x the quoted price.

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