I gotta hand it DataDog's sales team - it's the biggest combination of expensive and useless I've ever seen in my life, but they've somehow managed to convince the people with the checkbooks that they can't live without it.
1. Cannot really get the whole team on Datadog onboarding (Development too, not just “Infra”), so there are these really deep gaps that will never, ever be covered.
2. Don’t use all the services they pay for: “Oh, these CI/CD observability pipelines thing that costs us half our infrastructure? Yeah, I suppose they run fine.”, “Oh, these Profile Hosts? Yeah, just in case we use them, although it was 11 months the last time we did use them...”
3. Pay in excess for services they don’t take advantage of because of #1.
4. Cannot allocate time to follow through with their Account Manager and apply the spending suggestions they sometimes make. “Hey, you’re spending tons on Profile Hosts, but I don’t see usage. Have you looked into that? Oh, yeah, some day we will...”
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[1]: https://signoz.io/
I’ve seen it happen first hand where our side promises to be on board, and we start cancelling meetings with them, don’t follow Datadog training, report we don’t have time this week on Datadog meetings, etc. All after having paid for it.
I don’t see how that’s Datadog’s fault, but I’m eager to understand it better.
Someone from Datadog sales team talks to someone from marketing at Corporation X. Corp. X Marketing loves what Datadog salespeople sell and what amazing things they can get from it and, guess what? pay the first bill. Great job, team!
Now is when engagement with the technical team of corp X starts but the technical team that wasn't the one that agreed with the bill. Tech-savvy people knows that Datadog isn't worth it (that's why they aren't the ones that salespeople reach to). Now they have to justify a $83.000/year kinda bill they didn't sign up for. Great salespeople, great sales team. Scammers, if you ask me.
As someone from marketing, you've just signed the bill and are essentially the one who "colluded" with Datadog to take money out of Corp X's deep pockets, without fully understanding the technical implications or value of the product.
A cursory reading has not enlightened me.
$83,000/year to store your log files for you (you have to do the work of storing the log files).
I've been at many companies where they roll out Datadog and collect a crap ton of metrics/logs and so forth. Teams act all gung ho about "being data driven team" but quickly learn, almost all the numbers don't matter. As SRE, I attempt to drill down but any observations are met with silence or "Oh yea, that, meh, toss another 2 cores at the problem and let's move on."
At the cost of Datadog, their cost rarely exceeds outage cost or higher cloud bill cost. If you think you need it, buy it for a year where you can probably get good discount rate, use the data to rapidly improve most glaring issues you have then cancel the contract until you need it again in 3 years.
Obviously, if you are in highly responsive business, none of this applies but for us just cranking out B2B Rest APIs, you will be fine without Datadog.
Biggest strength is that it is user-friendly. I had very little trouble finding logs I care about, and to set up monitors + dashboards.