Datadog is expensive this is true. But I have never felt it be slow. Speed is not its killer feature. It’s everything you can do with it once you have logs and or metrics flowing into it.

The dashboards and their creation are intuitive. Creating alerts and things from airflow logs is easy using their DSL. Connecting and sending notifications to things like slack just works tm.

So this is how we justify the datadog costs because of all the engineering time (engineers are still expensive, ai hasn’t replaced us yet) it saves and how quickly we can move from raw logs and metrics to useful insights.