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Datadog acquires Quickwit

quickwit.io

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Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#51

Post by baobun »

orf wrote: post #33
scop wrote: post #30

I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda…

What does any of that have to do with the actual product?

Different person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever.

We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.

The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated.

If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#52

Post by dangoodmanUT »

nextaccountic wrote: post #25
francoismassot wrote: post #20

Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment. HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts: - Searching the web for under $1000/month [0] - A Rust optimization story [1] - Decentralized cluster membership in Rust…

I think you forgot to add the links Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source) Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?

I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and never fixing gross bugs)

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#53

Post by akshayshah »

zerd wrote: post #34
winrid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra with this as a potential cost saving measure.

The architecture of Husky seems fairly similar to quickwit. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky... https://quickwit.io/docs/main-branch/overview/architecture

It’s an ourobouros of influences: the Husky creators left DD to make Warpstream, Warpstream inspired Quickwit, and now Quickwit is joining DD.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#54

Post by mindcrash »

Dylan1312 wrote: post #24
mindcrash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?" They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hope…

Vector was already OSS when they acquired the company that created it, timber. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-techn...

And yet they did dedicate some resources on it, until now. Which basically is my point :)

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#55

Post by chronotis »

orf wrote: post #33
scop wrote: post #30

I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda…

What does any of that have to do with the actual product?

For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.

Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.

Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.

NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.

tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#56

Post by Multicomp »

samjewell wrote: post #17
spamizbad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.

I work at Grafana. Can you say more about what specifically you don’t recommend?

Not OP, but looked at doing grafana self hosted for similar reasons. The tooling is too spread out across different installables, the common golden signals and other monitoring metrics have a high learning curve / cliff more like it, and there's not good enough documentation to cover the user from "I want to do a synthetics test on a service to see if it is alive and show the results of that test in a graph"...a journey like that involves 4+ different tools.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#57

Post by datavirtue »

scop wrote: post #30

I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda…

The name is perfect, Data DOG.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#58

Post by datavirtue »

dirtshell wrote: post #42

Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.

It's just a solution to garbage distributed cloud service logs and devs that don't know how to log an application.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#59

Post by propter_hoc »

> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round.

Rhetorically, why was it time for this?

Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#60

Post by stevage »

slt2021 wrote: post #15
gnabgib wrote: post #5

Related: Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit (228 points, 6 months ago, 195 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701 Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042

* note to myself: build a successful product that threatens large slow moving legacy provider and get quickly acqui-hired

Is that not the standard disruption play?
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