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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage.

Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser and rarely push back when an engineer suggests a big-name SaaS solution with insane lock-in factor. Nobody seems to care about lock-in these days, it's only when your costs reach almost 100 million and interest rates are going up that you start thinking "Damn, I could have had all that for free if I had planned ahead and resisted all these platform lock-ins and unnecessary proprietary tools..."

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> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers.

Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate… but in the meantime. am I doing it wrong? If others are getting kickbacks I want in

Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks?

The difference between datadog and doing it yourself is that datadog is a well thought through product rather than a cobbled together set of various tools

Having a single interface for everything makes life so much easier across a number of different teams

Search is fast and easy to use for logs and traces

Being able to see what a user actually clicked on in their session is absolutely game changing for support teams

I’m not a huge fan of the bill but it’s so much better than anything we could do ourselves without a team of engineers dedicated to observability (which would cost far more than datadog)

> Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks?

You should have sorted it out before the integration, not after. Now you have no leverage.

I do a lot of negotiating on products like this. The most I've ever gotten was a shirt and some stickers for my kid. Definitely not enough to move the needle on $250k/year deals. I feel like I'm missing out!

I love how good DataDog is. It's a great product. Too expensive though. I love most of the people I've worked with at Grafana Cloud but it's a painful product. The price makes up for it though, so we use Grafana Cloud.

We may end up with something like signoz, when we have the cycles but the ROI is bad when I already have twice as much work as people and that barely more than KTLO.

> I love most of the people I've worked with at Grafana Cloud but it's a painful product. The price makes up for it though, so we use Grafana Cloud.

Hi, I run the Grafana team at Grafana Labs. If you could fix one thing, what would it be?

General usability. DataDog is intuitive and easy. Grafana is rough and requires a solid understanding of statistics and data analytics. The bar for using it is pretty high, so most engineers I know push it to someone else, which means there's one team doing the toil and working on creating simpler abstractions to hide the complexity.

HN has a tendency to explain every little thing with conspiracy theories. It can’t be a clear explanation based on incentives and people taking the path of least resistance, it must be malice. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t want to psychoanalyse why they think this way. But it is a bit tiring to interact with such people.

People who aren't harmed by these things don't notice them. Their incentive is to ignore as much as possible. Turning a blind eye is literally the safest option. But when you've had it rough, you literally can't stop seeing this stuff everywhere.

If you change your mindset from ignoring problems to looking for problems, you will find that there are problems everywhere. I'd rather be biased in that way than in the former. In my position, I can't afford to ignore even the tiniest problems.

> we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s reevaluate…

Moving away from those SaaS tools can be extremely painful and a lot more costly due to vendor lock in. In practice, typically, this "let's reevaluate" time never happens.

On the other hand, I don't really care. I normally suggest open source tools, but if people want to throw money at some vendor, fine by me.

Obviously SaaS providers will not offer kickbacks to startups, the deals aren't usually big enough. I've witnessed it in a big corporation once. One of the engineers was VERY insistent on using a specific solution even though it didn't make sense technically and everyone else was against it but because they were more senior, they made the final call. If they don't get outright bribes, they will get lucrative job offers from these big companies in the future.

Imagine being the guy who convinced Coinbase to use DataDog... That person will probably end up working at DataDog sooner or later if not already there... You can bet they will be getting a very cushy salary.

I could probably make a living out of extorting corrupt engineers. It's so predictable.

I know many of the senior folks at Datadog and they aren't stupid.

They wouldn't hire someone dumb enough to spend $5M a month on their product.

And hiring someone corrupt enough to sell out their previous employer for their current one is rarely a smart move, as they are liable to do the same when angling for their NEXT job.

> I could probably make a living out of extorting corrupt engineers.

Why don’t you walk the walk instead of merely talking the talk.

I have always thought that the big kickback for engineers is getting skills on your resume for the next job. "Resume-driven development" basically.

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