Live data from Hacker News

A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

twitter.com

11–20 of 227 posts

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

qryn is solid and very affordable because you self-host. it supports DD vectors out of the box. /dev/null is always a strong contender too.

Are you joking or is there actually a datadog-like startup named dev null?

I'm saying most logs are pointless to keep and would be better directed to /dev/null. Keep important transaction related logs and sample the rest.

The notion that every single log or metric across your entire technical architecture is worth keeping is one implanted by SaaS providers with a financial interest in naive engineers doing just that.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#12
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage. Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser a…

> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s r…

Obviously SaaS providers will not offer kickbacks to startups, the deals aren't usually big enough. I've witnessed it in a big corporation once. One of the engineers was VERY insistent on using a specific solution even though it didn't make sense technically and everyone else was against it but because they were more senior, they made the final call. If they don't get outright bribes, they will get lucrative job offers from these big companies in the future.

Imagine being the guy who convinced Coinbase to use DataDog... That person will probably end up working at DataDog sooner or later if not already there... You can bet they will be getting a very cushy salary.

I could probably make a living out of extorting corrupt engineers. It's so predictable.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#13

What is best cost effective and decent alternative to DD in 2023? I also feel like they are robbing me blind. Great product though.

Depends on what you want to monitor. Grafana is pretty decent, but the real draw to Datadog is their APM stack. The UI for tracing and looking at stuff is pretty awesome.

Though you could get most things into Grafana with something like Prometheus. The problem with Grafana is understanding what the limitations are. If you're not careful with the number of panels and such it can get quite slow.

I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough.

If you need to monitor some infrastructure you can just use Telegraf and output it to Grafana if needed. It kinda falls apart though because another great benefit of something like Datadog is not managing a time series db. That can get ugly real quick.

I guess it all just depends. If my bill was super high I wouldn't mind spending some resources on Prom/Grafana if you're in the Kube space or some Telegraf/InfluxDB if you're not.

I've also heard good things about Timescale but haven't used it.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

qryn is solid and very affordable because you self-host. it supports DD vectors out of the box. /dev/null is always a strong contender too.

Are you joking or is there actually a datadog-like startup named dev null?

Think of it like DataDog 2.0: https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#15
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage. Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser a…

> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s r…

Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks?

The difference between datadog and doing it yourself is that datadog is a well thought through product rather than a cobbled together set of various tools

Having a single interface for everything makes life so much easier across a number of different teams

Search is fast and easy to use for logs and traces

Being able to see what a user actually clicked on in their session is absolutely game changing for support teams

I’m not a huge fan of the bill but it’s so much better than anything we could do ourselves without a team of engineers dedicated to observability (which would cost far more than datadog)

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s r…

Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks? The difference between datadog and doing it yourself is that datadog is a well thought through product rather than a cobbled together set of various tools Having a single interface for everything makes life so much easier across a number of different teams Search is fast and easy to use for logs and traces Being able to see what a user actually clicked on in their session…

> Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks?

You should have sorted it out before the integration, not after. Now you have no leverage.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#17
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes with Graphana is free. The combo provides logging, performance stats and graphs and lets you auto-scale based on usage. Unfortunately, avoiding insanely costly SaaS solutions requires engineers to plan ahead and design the entire stack on top of certain open source solutions. I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Employers are none the wiser a…

> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s r…

HN has a tendency to explain every little thing with conspiracy theories. It can’t be a clear explanation based on incentives and people taking the path of least resistance, it must be malice. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t want to psychoanalyse why they think this way. But it is a bit tiring to interact with such people.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#18
post #9

Seems like there's opportunity for compition in SaaS monitoring then. I'd imagine a few small efficient teams could beat the price on the core part of what datadog offers. At 5000 employees Your probably paying for corporate bloat

There are plenty of competitors in the observability space, what's another one? The real issue is once your company is on a platform, it's very costly to move off. The biggest consideration is that it won't be a drop in change for all employees, so the retraining needed is substantial across all teams. Far easier to train employees in cardinality, and the cost implied by it, and to expose the cost for their particular monitoring to their teams.

This may come as a surprise but when giving money to a for-profit company, not only are you paying for corporate bloat, but you're also paying for the CEO's lavish compensation package, free lunches, and very costly health insurance for their employees. You're even paying for employee salaries while they're not doing work while on vacation!

If that's a big problem for you, Graphana may be the better product for you.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, I suspect that many engineers today receive kickbacks from SaaS providers to lock-in their employers. Cmon man, really? Drop the conspiracy theories. I’ve personally been the guy advocating for datadog at 4 startups. Mainly because of opportunity cost - we have 10-100 engineers, I want them building product not figuring out how to deploy a whole ecosystem of observability tools. IF we get big let’s r…

Obviously SaaS providers will not offer kickbacks to startups, the deals aren't usually big enough. I've witnessed it in a big corporation once. One of the engineers was VERY insistent on using a specific solution even though it didn't make sense technically and everyone else was against it but because they were more senior, they made the final call. If they don't get outright bribes, they will get lucrative job offe…

> I could probably make a living out of extorting corrupt engineers.

Why don’t you walk the walk instead of merely talking the talk.

Post reply on HN