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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

I may be cynical here, but I find that all open source datadog alternatives are mostly frontend focussed with an out of the box database. And it does not scale well. It's not easy to maintain, scale, shard etc. Am I wrong?

P.S. I am all for OSS.

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Quickwit is an alternative with a strong focus on scalability (max we have seen is 40PB) with a decoupled compute and storage architecture. But we do only logs and traces for now.

Repository: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit Latest release: https://quickwit.io/blog/quickwit-0.8

We're one of those OSS alternatives (HyperDX) - built on Clickhouse. While I can't say it's stupid simple to scale Clickhouse (because anything stateful is inherently hard to scale), it's orders of magnitude easier than other platforms like Elastic and gives you a lot more flexible tuning options (last co I was at, we ran that at massive scale, it was an absolute handful).

In theory, you can get away with just running a Clickhouse instance purely backed by S3 to get durability + scalability (at the cost of performance of course). It all depends on what scale you're running at and the HA/performance requirements you need.

presumably that is the right place to start for a datadog competitor because ddog is not going to care about smol instances that arent at scale that they can’t charge a bajillion for

But you have to be ready for day two. Nobody is going to pick an observability solution that does not scale. Some scalability is table stakes.

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