Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Honest question. If you need to pump data into datadog from your cloud, why not just stop doing that, and use the cloud tools? Datadog isnt' creating metrics. The metrics are already on your cloud provider (gcp,aws,etc) -- AND all these providers have ways to view metrics. Why do people pay 20k per month for data dog? They dont' want to use GCP metrics explorer? Same with TF cloud. You can just setup a jenkins job and do all the features TF cloud has in a few hours. Why pay TF cloud? Are people confused? I must be missing something. I worked at startups that thought all metrics need to be in datadog, but they didnt' understand they can just use metrics explorer. You can't even use sql to create graphs in datadog, it's awful.

IMHO If you are serious, dump the metrics into bigquery/redshift and start doing sql like an adult.

If you start pulling all the metrics we currently use in DataDog out of something like BQ/RedShift you're going to spend WAY more in terms of engineering hours and infrastructure than we're currently paying DataDog.

I keep hearing something about a company that switched their monitoring from DataDog to DataBricks and I can see that yes you probably could go build a monitoring solution on top of a datastore like that. But I certainly wouldn't want to.

For viewing, cloudwatch is simply nowhere as convenient, writing whole custom queries takes a lot of time, and setting up altering for just the right thing sometimes requires you to copy the complex result as another metric. Basically I can create a time-shifted difference of two metrics reporting at different intervals, smooth it and make it alert the right teams through slack and pagerduty in a minute or so (while getting a visual feedback on the query the whole time) - this would take a significant amount of time to do through the plain AWS process.

It's a bit like "you can write everything you want in assembler without the overhead of extra layers of X". Yeah, sure, I can. But I appreciate the extra layers of X. I'll take the right cost/convenience balance, like an adult, thank you.

I would not consider metrics explorer to be a particularly good product. For queries where the query builder isn't good enough and you write PromQL instead, they don't even let you alias the legend; instead you must see the entire query as the label for that line.

A pretty minor nitpick, but indicative of the level of attention they give the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com