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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Datadog costs more to monitor your AWS t3.medium instance than the actual instance.

I asked them how them can justify that.

They recommended I use "modern infrastructure" which means Docker.

(Disclaimer: I work at Chronosphere, a Datadog competitor) This is a big issue in the observability space. We have written a few blog posts on this, but basically it’s easy to fall into a trap where cardinality and high dimensional monitoring causes your metrics to pop, causing costs to skyrocket. You have a few experiments, are running a bunch of smaller k8s pods per cluster and whoosh! you might be looking at millions, rather than thousands of time series that you're sending to your provider. Most vendors won’t provide tooling or suggest ways to reduce these costs, b/c they have no economic incentive to do so…. Anyway, bottom line is that no one should have to pay more to observe a service than to operate it.

Also: it’s 2023. Every company needs to be getting compatible with open standards like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, etc.

Some of the vendors in the space are absolutely going in on OTel. DD seems to be working actively against it.

> They recommended I use "modern infrastructure" which means Docker.

It looks to me they recommended to never consider Datadog for anything whatsoever, ever again.

Sounds like New Relic 2.0

not even close. NR doesn't bill overages, doesn't do per-host. we switched and saved tens of thousands monthly

Was Datadog pricing per-host? If so, then I guess running a Kubernetes cluster using the biggest available instances is the most "modern" solution to Datadog-using infrastructure.

It is mainly per host $15 or $23 PCM with the first 5-10 containers free then $0.002 per hour (~$1.5 PCM) per container. The insight and stats you get are quite granular and valuable however. For large scale deployments you can ignore certain containers etc.

Per host and/or per container

Basically, yes.

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