Datadog S-1

Its insanely unclear. I get that their product domain is complex, and thus its hard to bill for, but... its things like, if you're container-focused, you still pay for nodes, and you get X number of containers per node that you're allowed to track. You wire up an AWS integration and it (1) counts as a node? I've heard different things from different salespeople about this, and (2) drives up your AWS bill like crazy because of the amount of data it pulls (our AWS bill is low-five-figures, and the Datadog integration represents 3-5% of it). The datadog-agent inside our kube clusters was constantly one of our largest logging services, until we started filtering those out. We had one of our services go crazy on logs one month, driving up our bill by 1500% until someone caught it (we're small. we make mistakes. we're learning). You can't delete the logs, they wouldn't, so we had to eat a 5 figure bill when we're used to, like $1000/month.

And its expensive. Maybe its comparable to something like New Relic, I don't know, but relative to StackDriver or CloudWatch? Its in a totally different league. Just on logging, its hard to do apples-to-apples because DD bills on lines whereas CloudWatch bills on bytes, but for our logging patterns, even with our annual enterprise discount on DD (and no discounts on AWS) DataDog is about 5x more expensive. CloudWatch (even with the new Insights product) is pretty hard to ask front-line developers to use, but StackDriver is pretty nice, and its also pretty cheap.

We joke about Datadog among our ops team. When we were investigating adopting them, I signed up for an account with my company email. Within a week, members of their sales teams were emailing our frontend developers, who I imagine they found by linking my company email to a LinkedIn company, about setting up a call. I'd get about one unprompted call a week from someone from their sales org.

Their product is great. Possibly even special, though I don't believe its miles better than StackDriver. The company is a nightmare. I tell everyone I can to stay away, at least until they sort out their sales and technical support organizations, if they ever do.

“Because K8s (depending on how you install it) runs a bunch of little containers handling various back end things, you might not deploy anything to the cluster and still be WAY over that 10 container limit. ”

The way we manage that is to explicitly filter for containers. Don’t monitor all containers by default, make it opt-in and you’ll be fine.

We started out with New Relic but was unhappy with the customer support. We wanted to upgrade our subscription and reached out 3 times. We were ignored all three times. It took 3 tries to get our subscription cancelled.

Datadog seems a lot better. Their support team actually gets back to you at least. If you are a small customer New Relic will not care for you as much as the big customers. Even though we were using $500+ per month.

To add another example Postman keeps charging my card after my account was deleted. I reached out and they said Rey couldn’t find any previous record from my email and requested I forward the email I got. But I can’t because ProtonMail doesn’t allow forwarding. To this day Postman is attempting to charge my card every month. Lucky for me I usually don’t have money on that account but once it does come in Postman can expect a chargeback and formal complaint to the authorities of their shady business practices which violates EU regulations.

TLDR; big companies suck when it comes to canceling subscriptions.