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.
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].
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.
You just described that someone/some team sold something that doesn't meet the customer's need. If you can't see what happened, I can try to explain it for you:
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.
My understanding is that DD is widely regarded as one of the best observability platforms if you can stomach the bill. Could you elaborate on the comment that DD is "useless"? Would love to understand where it comes short compared to other platforms.
the whole pipeline: from an SDK to add metrics collection to your program, to an agent running on machines, to a collector for those stats, to a dashboard with pretty graphs you can use, sliced up in meaningful ways, and to monitor/troubleshoot problems when they arise, to alerting, so you don't have to worry about the system not running when you're not looking at it.
IMO, I wouldn't call it useless, it's "useless for most teams".
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.
