Comment by user3939382
2 days ago
There’s so many of these log aggregators I’ve completely lost track. I used Datadog extensively and found it overpriced and a very confusing UI.
2 days ago
There’s so many of these log aggregators I’ve completely lost track. I used Datadog extensively and found it overpriced and a very confusing UI.
That's what happens when there's a need for something.
You see an explosion in offerings, and then eventually it's whittled down to a handful of survivors.
Everyone has found Datadog to be overpriced!
So they switch to Prometheus and Grafana and now have to manage a Prometheus cluster. Far cheaper, but far more annoying.
I have no experience with Datadog, but I'm not sure "cheaper" is an easy adjective to quantify. The whole metrics/logs/traces thing in Kubernetes is still painful, a lot of work and there's no end to the confusion. After several years in the trenches, it still takes me longer (i.e. more money) to install, configure and make sense of a monitoring stack than to set up the software it is monitoring.
It doesn't help that typically most software is ancient, spits out heaps of stack traces and wall-of-text output, doesn't use structured logging and generally doesn't let itself be monitored easily.
So yeah, getting meaningful insights from a highly available observability stack will take some serious time and resources, and I can understand smaller companies just handing it over to a third party so they can get on with their core business (AKA easy billing).
Datadog is a good product but one of the most blatantly overpriced things I’ve had the displeasure to use.