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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk and happy and think Datadog is cool.

Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim to deserve a second look?

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What does any of that have to do with the actual product?

It made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight with me in answering my question?

The product itself is very good, but the sales process is truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?" They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just bad, it's comically bad.

That is their product. You want to cancel? Send the army of clowns.

Different person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever.

We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.

The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated.

If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.

qw is open source so you can continue to use the foss-licensed software as it is

For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.

Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.

Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.

NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.

tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product

There are multiple possible outcomes from the merge with Datadog.

As my ex manager once told - there is no such thing as nice people in P&L statement. Someone has to pay

It's very easy to be anxious and see the path to the dark side here.

However one of possible outcomes - there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems, and this along secure the rest of scene from relicensing. There is a chance it will be all win-win with clear sustainable path and no money and power struggles for founders.

I want to stay on the positive here. Time will show.

Is Grafana and its ecosystem no longer open source? I haven't used it in a while

No, no. It's all good and amazing. IMHO Grafana is getting even more important in the light of possible disappearing a solid potential competitor. Hope Datadog will be smart enough with Quickwit and opportunity to win the hearts and minds.

Clearly an opportunity for Datadog to make a big statement here, and change its perceptions.

> there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems

You may want to check out SigNoz [1] - takes a all in one app approach compared to different modules for each signal approach which Grafana takes

Disclaimer : I am one of the maintainers

[1] https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz

I have had the opposite experience. Sales has been really respectful of our time.

Agreed. Once they had a whiff of our domain every engineer was being bombarded with emails like “Re: meeting next week”.

> Get us all drunk and happy

Damn I never get sales pitches like that.

The name is perfect, Data DOG.

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