Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

My wife is friends someone a DD sales person. I had no idea what her husband did for a living since I didn't know either. So we go over to their house for dinner and he finds out I'm head of a devops/SRE team and I got a DD sales pitch for close to 2 hours.

I've never wanted to excuse myself to the bathroom and just sit in there doing nothing all night more in all my life.

That really sucks.

Lots of comments here saying "it's just marketing". I agree to some extent, but Datadog is easily the worst offender I've ever seen.

I work on a small engineering team and more than half the team got calls to their personal numbers and emails from Datadog. They are relentless. It's a huge turn-off, and I hope companies like this get named-and-shamed more often.

Yes - pretty much every our engineer with “lead” in title was persietently attacked by them. They were so persistent that we needed to implement a company-wide block on their email domain. After that calls to personal numbers began. It went so far at one point we needed to make threats with legal action.

At one point we were on a market for solutin like theirs and we talked with their engineering (we temporarily lifted the block) and I have to say the product is solid (though not suitable for our needs, due to some specifics). We still use Vector. Soon after we needed to enable the block again.

I spoke to them and didn't follow up. They called at least five of our engineers (on the telephone) to try and get in touch with me.

What can we do to make this less acceptable?

Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior.

My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal.

At a previous employer, we actually had to get a special exemption from our engineering president when we felt Datadog was a good choice for our organization's needs. He was so upset with Datadog's incessant marketing that he would regularly make "you can buy whatever you want as long as it's not Datadog" jokes on calls.

Not all monitoring solutions are unbelievably expensive. For example, netdata is excellent and is free.

Comparative to DD, Netdata doesn't have logs and traces (yet), but metrics are the best monitoring fidelity in the market. And any sales emails are hidden in the middle of all those alerts notifications, so you're good.

I don't think you can compare netdata to Datadog

[Self-plug] After building poachme.dev with a friend, I have personally found that a lot of people who spam really do it because it's low cost and wasting your time costs them nothing so I personally grab the standard reply message template and hit them with a

"Great. Please book a slot on my calendar and we can chat more about this: https://bk.poachme.dev/Lazaro"

I know they didn't "read my profile" or "find me to be the best candidate" so I just respond in kind... you wanna waste my time? Fine, I'll sit through your shpeill for $100 and if I'm so important to you, you'll pay it, if not, well, that's fine too.

Is this side hustle approved and sanctioned by your employer the FAA, or have you gone and created something possibly on company (taxpayer) time which means the FAA actually has an ownership interest in poachme.dev?

> Is this side hustle approved and sanctioned by your employer the FAA, or have you gone and created something possibly on company (taxpayer) time which means the FAA actually has an ownership interest in poachme.dev?

Not employed by the FAA... I've created something on my own personal time and you seem to be upset, you should take something to help you.

ha this is really cool - has anyone paid the $100 for a call with you, with regard to recruiting or sales spam?

Yes, and those people get my full priority.

Off-topic, tried to sign up on mobile - some strange auto scroll meant I couldn’t get past filling in my name! Happy to provide more info if you can’t repro.

That's kinda weird, I will tell you that signups are kinda limited right now since we're slowly rolling out features since we want to offer value to people.

Try the sign-up link with the referral code (https://bk.poachme.dev/PayMeToo)

I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied.

Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since.

EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were trying to convince me to switch to them from AWS. On the third call they arranged when we were going to talk about moving some ML workloads over, they just didn't show up and the 3 Googlers they invited to the meeting never contacted us again.

What alternative did you find? Their product has always seemed nice in demos, but the aggressive marketing has made it hard for me to look at getting more involved.

It really depends on what you are trying to do and what you are willing to spend.

If you are looking for APM, take a look at New Relic. I've used both in production at similar (~1m requests/hour (DD) and ~10m requests/hour (NR)) scales. They are both good and expensive.

If you just want logs, metrics, dashboards, and alerts, there are tons of alternatives that are cheaper and better.

In that case, Atatus is affordable in my opinion.

If you are a windows shop avoid DD like the plague. If you don't have Pwsh devs avoid new relic for windows.

Between the two, I prefer Dynatrace. Just a bit simpler user interface

As an owner of a couple of companies, I get almost constant unsolicited spam, SMS, and calls.

I generally ignore most. Occasionally, if I feel confident it will be honored, I unsub.

I just feel that it is corrosive, professionally, to complain about/attack others in a professional fora.

For example, LinkedIn often has stuff posted that could be used as a powerful emetic. I just ignore it. I may take note of the author, for consideration in professional relationships, but I won't usually say anything about their posting.

There are a number of subreddits, dedicated to sneering at others; I am aware of ones dedicated to sneering at programmers (having been honored by their attention).

While these may be de rigueur, while in high school or early college, I believe that it's a bad idea to continue participating in these types of things, once we start earning a paycheck. Often, the people we slag, can end up in a position to do us favors, hire us, or fire us. Some corporations simply won't even consider us, if our name shows up in these places (I know that the one I worked for was obsessed with brand protection, and would not consider folks that they believed would not reflect well on their brand).

That also goes for posting attacks; no matter how "genteel," in places like this very forum. I generally avoid getting into pissing matches with folks, hereabouts.

As George Bernard Shaw said:

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

I agree, this is pretty normal across the industry. Sales people just trying to do their job and sell their product. Sometimes they are quite persistent but why complain, if you are not interested in the product they are selling, just ignore their emails.

I wish you could just ignore emails. If you don’t respond they’ll call your personal cellphone.

Yes, and yes they also reached out to me on my personal cell phone and on my work email. I blocked the gentleman, Philippe literally everywhere because I got so annoyed by him.

I also tweeted @datadoghq publicly to finally stop bothering me. No calls / emails / LinkedIn requests since then.

They went as far as calling my personal cell with a marketing/sales pitch. Their sales practices are obnoxious and the reason I will actively try and keep them out of any company I work with.

This seems like it isn't DD specific. I've had my fare share of experiences with overly aggressive sales people. It feels like it's just the incentive.

If a sales person makes one sale it doesn't matter if the organization's reputation is overall negatively impacted, they got paid and reputation is something that takes years to really see large impact from. Given that sales people work on commission, or at least largely so, and may not even work at a company for more than a few years, it makes sense to aggressively pursue every potential lead. You'll remember "DD has aggressive sales" and not "that one sales person is super aggressive".

I'm not sure how companies should fix this other than increasing base pay and decreasing commission payouts, but obviously that has its own incentive issues.

I guess a company wide policy of "never contact someone more than X times per Y timeframe" and "never ever ever contact someone via cell phone wtf" would help.

> Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

I mean... Yes? Spamming and calling people is what Datadog is known for; you might as well ask if people have been shaken down by Oracle, seen Google discontinue a product, or had Microsoft force their laptop to reboot at an inconvenient time. That's their whole thing.

Ha, I know that now I suppose. Honestly wasn't aware of that reputation before this thread. I thought it was a fairly nice-looking well-regarded service that I hadn't used; was surprised and turned off by the emails.

There goes my hope someone there would see the thread and get them to knock it off, I suppose, if it's so ingrained.

Yeah, that's fair. Live and learn; everyone has to discover these things somehow.

It's a shame because the product really is excellent and engineers in general are particularly allergic to such scammy hard-sell sales tactics

Yup. I did a trial and their product came out on top, but their sales tactics were so aggressive that I went elsewhere. They were trying to call me 6+ times a day.

6 times a day? Is that an exaggeration?

I got a cold call from them at my previous job, which was enough to make me write off using it, as a tech lead and senior in the org who could have gotten us all onboard. Especially since our tool at the time was failing us.

That said, at my new job they actually are using it and it IS a fantastic product. So... maybe cool it on the sales and marketing as that was actively counterproductive with me, when the product speaks for itself.

edit: I should add, I do put my phone number out there, the call was during business hours, and they didn't call any further after I said I wasn't interested, so looking at it objectively now it wasn't the worst experience.

This is pretty standard in the industry. I've been getting emails from Datadog for years. Not saying it's a good practice, but this is nothing new. This strategy must work because tons of successful companies do it.

I've had seen this from a number of companies: Datadog, Snyk, and Mongo are the most recognizable offenders, but I get this from dozens of companies every week. They ignore unsubscribe requests and my requests to stop contacting me when they call my personal number. I just report them to FTC now for not respecting the do not call list (which my number is on). Other than that, their tactics ensure their products don't even make it onto the list when we are considering a solution. We've gone with competitors in each applicable category.

Much of the spam sent to my business' email address doesn't even have an automated unsubscribe capability. The unsubscribe link is just a mailto: address, which I am convinced these shady operators use to indicate the mailbox is being watched and, thus, a good target for future mailings.

They go right into Fastmail spam and are scored accordingly.

It's not just Datadog. I've noticed a huge uptick recently in the amount of cold marketing spam to my business' email address--that I don't even have published anywhere but LinkedIn.

Surprise!

I talked to one of their sales people once on the phone.

I don't really mind the effort. You have to sell to grow your business.

Its one thing to grow your business, but repeatedly spamming people is obnoxious and gives me a bad impression of their company. Next time I need an obseravbility product, datadog will not be high in my list of candidates

I have a catch-all on our domain. Occasionally someone at Datadog enumarates mails with names on Linkedin but some fails. So its not just their CRM.

But when I apply to startup program through AWS activate, almost radio silence. So, there goes their priorities.

B2B SaaS marketing is one of those things where its absolutely awful, and yet works well enough. So in light of the recent downturn managers are just cracking the whip and telling their marketing/development/sales/enablement people and tools to spam-harder. Taking an already bad experience and dialing up the volume.

As a buyer in the past I vehemently hated it. As a sales engineer now I fully realize i'm part of the problem, but have no solutions/alternatives to offer. Product led growth is my preferred approach but never have I ever seen a company not doing that switch to doing that.

I got cold contacted through my public phone # a while back when I was actively interviewing and had my resume public. They had found me by looking up my employer at the time in LinkedIn. Reason being that we had used Datadog in the past but no longer were. It was honestly a bit creepy, but I gave them the time of day to ask me questions so as to not burn a potential bridge.

This does not look like marketing as such, it is usually generated as part of sales (cold) outreach, Sales/Business Development representatives send this type of thing to customers when they are prospecting.

Marketing is different strategy. SDRs/BDRs are looking at very specific accounts and targeting specific people vs marketing which is typically not specific.

If you’re in Europe (or a citizen living outside) you can make a GDPR subject access request to get a copy of your data. Try to specifically ask for a record of how your data was obtained. And you can also ask to be deleted permanently. It might or might not work but it’s what you are entitled to under the GDPR.

edit: check out https://yourdigitalrights.org/ which might give you some templates and check whether you’re covered by other privacy regulations in case the GDPR does not apply.

The argument they make is that it's OK because they got your details from a "public" data source, plus guesswork. E.g. LinkedIn plus your company domain. They're still supposed to notify you when your info was transferred to them though.

The problem is that this is in breach of LinkedIn terms and conditions, which means I immediately write off the company: if they can't lawfully find marketing leads, which should I trust them to lawfully process my business data.

Whether PII is publicly available or not doesn't matter, they are still processing and storing it without consent. This works differently from "expectation of privacy" in the US, for example, where often anything is fair game as long as you can trace it back to a public space.

You could literally staple your business card to your building's front door and they can't use it without explicit consent. Heck, the other day I called my legal insurance and the lawyer they referred me to initiated the conversation with reading out a GDPR disclosure because he needed my insurance number and needed to sync it with the insurance company (a third party), which meant transferring PII.

IANAL and could be wrong here, but I don’t think it matters. Personal data is personal. Even if it’s posted publicly it’s still personal data. Email is personal data. Your name is personal data. Plus spam laws are a thing.

In any case, at the very least GDPR gives you a chance to delete your data. Hopefully so it doesn’t reappear either.

I would not take any of it so seriously. This is really common across multiple companies. I'm work in a Data Science org and get so much crap like this.

I think there is some CRM that automatically sends these emails to all the email addresses in their system. Your email address is easy to figure out since every company has something like first.lastname@company.com, finitiallastname@company.com etc. You can use LinkedIn to find people with a particular job title and then spam them.

The most comical set of emails I received was from a company that used an ever escalating set of words and images (e.g. a sad puppy) to try and make me feel guilty and respond. I found the sad puppy one so amusing I almost replied just to say the email made me chuckle.

Click the SPAM button and send it to your Junk Folder. Eventually the CRM system will realize you are never going to respond.

Occasional a sales person will contact me on LinkedIn or tries more personal ways to reach them, I just say that I'm not in a position to make any evaluation or purchasing decisions and I don't know anybody who does. That usually stops everything quickly.

> Eventually the CRM system will realize you are never going to respond

Citation needed. In my experience this does not happen. Additionally, even if true, the rate of new companies employing this strategy will mean that your inbox will always be full.

The only spam from Datadog I get in my company are alerts and alert digests and that's in a span of a year. Much more often I get promotional emails from companies we considered but did not fully sign up for but that's far from aggressive.

For statistics: small-mid company <50 employees.

Marketing spam is a fact of life. Just unsubscribe, delete, and/or ignore because nothing is going to change. There are entire industries (CRM, Marketing Automation, commercial data brokers, etc.) built on this.

This isn’t exclusive to Datadog. Anybody with some sort of senior or lead engineering role often gets these emails from various companies. I have received such emails from companies other than Datadog many times.

They have repeatedly called my personal phone to “just check in” despite me telling them each time that I’m not interested. Never contacted them or gave them personal info as far as I can remember.

I've had relentless cold sales spam including calling my personal cell number multiple times from both Dynatrace and Kong.

I refuse to do business with them out of principle.

I guess this is lame, but no different than 100s of other shops selling B2B services.

Yes loads of spam directed at individuals data harvested from linkedin in the last few months. I recently banned the domain.

Dev sec ops… the industry is just trolling people with this shit now

This is why there is an unsubscribe link for unsolicited spam/ad email as legally required. Just use it. Unsolicited email isn't illegal so you just have to deal with it. I wish I was -only- getting spam from datadog that I could opt out of instead of unceasing spam from places that the unsubscribe link is just a confirmation that your email address is real.

I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming it's illegal; however, it could be considered unethical and, at a minimum, highly annoying. Also, many times the "unsubscribe" links do nothing more than generate a new email to the same sender, which in my opinion is often used to verify leads.