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Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#21
post #20
post #19

Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior. My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal. At a previous…

Not all monitoring solutions are unbelievably expensive. For example, netdata is excellent and is free .

I don't think you can compare netdata to Datadog

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#22
post #4

It's a shame because the product really is excellent and engineers in general are particularly allergic to such scammy hard-sell sales tactics

Yup. I did a trial and their product came out on top, but their sales tactics were so aggressive that I went elsewhere. They were trying to call me 6+ times a day.

6 times a day? Is that an exaggeration?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#23
My wife is friends someone a DD sales person. I had no idea what her husband did for a living since I didn't know either. So we go over to their house for dinner and he finds out I'm head of a devops/SRE team and I got a DD sales pitch for close to 2 hours.

I've never wanted to excuse myself to the bathroom and just sit in there doing nothing all night more in all my life.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#24
I've had seen this from a number of companies: Datadog, Snyk, and Mongo are the most recognizable offenders, but I get this from dozens of companies every week. They ignore unsubscribe requests and my requests to stop contacting me when they call my personal number. I just report them to FTC now for not respecting the do not call list (which my number is on). Other than that, their tactics ensure their products don't even make it onto the list when we are considering a solution. We've gone with competitors in each applicable category.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#25
post #23

My wife is friends someone a DD sales person. I had no idea what her husband did for a living since I didn't know either. So we go over to their house for dinner and he finds out I'm head of a devops/SRE team and I got a DD sales pitch for close to 2 hours. I've never wanted to excuse myself to the bathroom and just sit in there doing nothing all night more in all my life.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#26
post #17

I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied. Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since. EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were…

What alternative did you find? Their product has always seemed nice in demos, but the aggressive marketing has made it hard for me to look at getting more involved.

Between the two, I prefer Dynatrace. Just a bit simpler user interface

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#27
Yes - pretty much every our engineer with “lead” in title was persietently attacked by them. They were so persistent that we needed to implement a company-wide block on their email domain. After that calls to personal numbers began. It went so far at one point we needed to make threats with legal action.

At one point we were on a market for solutin like theirs and we talked with their engineering (we temporarily lifted the block) and I have to say the product is solid (though not suitable for our needs, due to some specifics). We still use Vector. Soon after we needed to enable the block again.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#28
post #17

I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied. Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since. EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were…

What alternative did you find? Their product has always seemed nice in demos, but the aggressive marketing has made it hard for me to look at getting more involved.

It really depends on what you are trying to do and what you are willing to spend.

If you are looking for APM, take a look at New Relic. I've used both in production at similar (~1m requests/hour (DD) and ~10m requests/hour (NR)) scales. They are both good and expensive.

If you just want logs, metrics, dashboards, and alerts, there are tons of alternatives that are cheaper and better.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?

#30
post #20
post #19

Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior. My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal. At a previous…

Not all monitoring solutions are unbelievably expensive. For example, netdata is excellent and is free .

Comparative to DD, Netdata doesn't have logs and traces (yet), but metrics are the best monitoring fidelity in the market. And any sales emails are hidden in the middle of all those alerts notifications, so you're good.
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