Say what you want about Datadog's pricing and sales tactics... the product is a joy to use.
We also had some collector troubles and support basically did nothing but wasted our time in calls repeatedly
DIY only make sense at a very small scale or very large scale, everything in between is usually best offloaded to those which do it as their core competency.
It seems like very small scale has the highest leverage of utility-priced services (and often fits into free tiers of many).
More broadly I’ve never used managed service that would “just work” and wouldn’t require substantial configuration and often times bunch of workarounds but maybe those exist
Yes, in theory, in the middle scale, you should outsource things, but in practice, it only works if the managed service is at the right price.
just terrible.
imo they should drastically simplify their billing dimensions so a simple human can understand it. for a certain size of company it just makes no sense to need to be engaged with a sales teams.
We approached them to see if they would work with us on reducing the massive bill that resulted. They agreed to cut it by 50% if we signed up for additional services. I'm not talking about a future volume discount; we were working with them for a good faith credit once we discovered the mismatch with their billing model (we had already filtered out those instance types)
Objectively, we owed the money. However, every other vendor I've run into works with small companies like ours without resorting to those kinds of tactics, so it's a pretty terrible look for them.
But there are some caveats. Facets can break in unexpected ways and the last time you want to be dealing with this is when you're dealing with a fire in production.
Too much friction in their sales process. But I guess I am not the target audience.
This is one of the reasons why I steer away from anything that requires a demo. If an org can't present even a read-only interactive version of the product, then it likely means that there is a KPI/OKR-heavy pitch intended for management or non-engineering business stakeholders to hear (of which the upselling you alluded to is a part).
The majority of the (F)OSS alternatives out there can be demo'ed with little-to-no engineering lift from prospective users. This is meaningful for the adoption story because it creates bottom-up pressure to internally pitch to relevant stakeholders— a much more powerful tool than external pitches. The fact that Datadog seems either unwilling or incapable of doing this historically, while touting one of the more expensive products in that particular vertical, suggests that the product value-add may not speak for itself (at least to a significant subset of engineers).