What I’ve seen happen is that people pay Datadog and, for some reason or another, they:

  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...”

I would definitely not call them useless, but gosh they are expensive for the minimum of things, which I agree if you cannot commit to the points above, you might as well setup your own Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Mimir + Tempo stack and see what you can come up with, or even try one of the other alternatives I’ve seen around, like SigNoz[1].

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[1]: https://signoz.io/