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

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

#151

Post by ogn3rd »

bunnyfoofoo wrote: post #64
legohead wrote: post #62

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

Their sales team is a nightmare, I had to block them on personal and company email.

I briefly worked there. They literally have no idea what they're doing, like not even a little bit.

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

#152

Post by jrockway »

rocmcd wrote: post #103
ren_engineer wrote: post #71

OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419

OpenTelemetry (or OTel) is in no way an existential threat to DataDog. Primarily because OTel is simply the substrate/protocol by which data is collected from your apps/systems. DD does _a lot_ more than what OTel provides (RUM, SIEM, synthetics, on-call, dashboarding, anomaly detection, and much much more). If anything it's an existential threat to the more legacy vendors that aren't equipped to provide an OTel inge…

I don't know the exact history of OTel, but I agree with you. A few years ago, open source applications basically included one type of telemetry: Prometheus metrics. (Maybe Jaeger for tracing if you're really, really lucky.) What OTel is is a way to write an open-source library that emits telemetry, but without dictating that the end user use a particular storage system. Basically, you can use Datadog instead of the open-source stuff, even if the library authors have never heard of Datadog.

Datadog specifically, I don't know if they care. They had an army of junior engineers that existed to hack Datadog into every open source project imaginable. If something had monitoring, they would just add their vendor-specific stuff and upstream it. That was probably expensive but probably accounts for a vast amount of their early marketshare. The other vendors wanted in on that racket without having to do too much work; OTel was born.

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

#153

Post by ericmay »

c2h5oh wrote: post #93
legohead wrote: post #62

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

Datadog startup journey from my perspective: 1. use Datadog, because it gets you a bunch of stuff without having to really set it up, like anomaly detection, which is poor man's monitoring & alerting 2. once you start getting product-market fit and the number of instances you run grows you notice your monthly bill going crazier and crazier and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team -> migrate to a…

I'm not familiar with pricing but depending on alternatives maybe this isn't so bad?

> and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team

Like what if Datadog just replaces your ops team completely? What if we start to see AI tools that do cost a lot of money but they can replace a team? Just curious.

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

#154

Post by ogn3rd »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #111
legohead wrote: post #62

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

> Datadog prices are out of this world. I was never sure of what exactly Datadog did, so I looked at their pricing. At first, I thought "$23/month/host isn't THAT bad...", then notice that was only for one product. If you used their full suite, those costs could REALLY add up.

Especially when you're realize that the billing features have been turned up to 11 on turn-key rollout. Sampling set at 100%, gosh that's expensive right out of the box, but no accident.

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

#156

Post by Rapzid »

panda888888 wrote: post #48

Why does the tweet author think this is wild? Sure, 65 million is a lot, but plenty of companies pay large bills for their major cloud services (especially AWS/Azure and the like). I'm not an expert on monitoring/observability/telemetry etc, nor an expert on Datadog pricing/billing, but paying a lot of money for major infrastructure components doesn't surprise me.

Imagine you had 65 great engineers to build out your companies observability infra. They can use and contribute to OSS tools like Loki and Prometheus. They can split off small teams to build brand new infra and tools. This is THIRTEEN teams of 5 engineers!

You give them 1m each.

You never see them again.

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

#157

Post by ibejoeb »

davidw wrote: post #128

I feel nostalgic for the days of grepping logs in some ways. At a previous company, we had DD, and I got asked to find some problem. I was able to sift through the data in it and zero in on the instance and find the bad data that came in. Then it got expensive and so they turned on 'sampling' and the next time I was asked to look for a particular problem, we had no idea if it was even logged.

That reminds me of the quip in gnu parallel about log search: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_examples.html...

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

#158

Post by coinbasethrow »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #79

Damn. Why not self-host something on that scale?!

They did build a self hosted alternative based on grafana, Loki, Prometheus

Had a whole team of 10+ engineers working on it for 2 quarters, then scrapped it because it performed terribly

The only thing that came of it was negotiation leverage with datadog ("give us X% off or we go self hosted")

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

#159

Post by secondcoming »

c2h5oh wrote: post #93
legohead wrote: post #62

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

Datadog startup journey from my perspective: 1. use Datadog, because it gets you a bunch of stuff without having to really set it up, like anomaly detection, which is poor man's monitoring & alerting 2. once you start getting product-market fit and the number of instances you run grows you notice your monthly bill going crazier and crazier and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team -> migrate to a…

We're going through this now. What other products are out there, preferably easy for a moron to set up?
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