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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

When my team was forced to use it a few years ago it was order of magnitude more expensive than diy prometheus/grafana while being less friendly to devs - their metric query language absolutely sucked. Was more friendly to non-devs who liked pretty ui tho…

We also had some collector troubles and support basically did nothing but wasted our time in calls repeatedly

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Managed services are always more expensive than DIY FWIW. You're paying to make running the product someone else's problem.

We were not at a scale where you would want to hire dedicated observability expert but with their pricing it totally made sense. My guess is their play is to get in early and get you locked in gud

That is why DIY is usually more expensive than managed services. Engineering hours are expensive and best spent on your core competencies.

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.

Why does DIY make sense at very small scale IYO?

It seems like very small scale has the highest leverage of utility-priced services (and often fits into free tiers of many).

I would caution against sweeping generalizations like that. In this case “diy” part is basically just configuration management which with dd you will have to do anyway. And sure they make it slightly easier by providing defaults for most things but Prometheus/grafana do a decent job at it too.

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

At every single org I've been where Datadog has been considered, the conclusion has been "Yes, it would be cool, but we really can't justify the price."

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.

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