Our team tried to set up open telemetry to replace Datadog and got totally crushed in complexity. The model of having Open Telemetry just be for standardizing & exporting to other backends, needing glue for each part of the setup was nuts.
Datadog isn't just a collector, but the whole querying UI as well, right?
The lead dev is super passionate about straightforward software that just works, and it shows.
Later my coworker deployed VictoriaLogs in about 15 minutes, added it to our syslog targets. Night and day compared to Elastic. Use both of them probably every day through Grafana.
The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but the querying is the same. We are also looking at Dash0 but for all of my personal and consulting jobs, OSS LGTM/P works good for me.
But yes it seemed like OTel was more interested in being a spec than a tool.
is the closest i've seen to the datadog experience