Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved • Hacker News Board

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#61

Post by happymellon » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

viccis wrote: post #60

happymellon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's also frustrating is that a lot of times, costs are hidden from engineering. I don't know if I would call them mediocre, but without a feedback loop its hard to get engineers to agree whether it's worth time reviewing the code to make it faster compared to just making the db one size larger.

>costs are hidden from engineering Yeah one of my big pet peeves was when engineering teams build platforms to run things on that obscure the cost. There have been times where they said "hey we made this big platform for analytics, just ship your stuff as configuration changes and it's deployed!" Then when I did it with very simple small cases, some unoptimized stuff on their end (a lot of what I talked about before)…

Yeah, that sounds terrible.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#62

Post by hagen1778 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

secondcoming wrote: post #28

decimalenough wrote: post #14

> Assume that Datadog cuts the number of outages by half, by preventing them with early monitoring. That would mean that without Datadog, we’d look at 24 hours’ worth of downtime, not 12. Let’s also assume that using Datadog results in mitigating outages 50% faster than without - thanks to being able to connect health metrics with logs, debug faster, pinpoint the root cause and mitigate faster. In that case, without…

We are moving from Datadog to Prometheus/Grafana and it's really not all a bed of roses. You'll need monitoring on your monitoring.

Ofc you need to monitor your monitoring, because you run it. Datadog runs their own systems and monitors them, that's why they charge you so much. I barely can imagine a criticial piece of software that I need to run and not monitor it in the same time.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#63

Post by hagen1778 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

My understanding is that with Prometheus+Grafana, and the rest of their stack, you can achieve the same functionality as Datadog (or even more) at much lower costs. But, it requires engineering time to set up these tools, monitor them, build dashboards and alerts. Build an observability platform at home, in other words.

But what about other open source solutions that already trying very hard to become an out-of-box solution for observability? Things like Netdata, Hyperdx, Coroot, etc. are already platforms for all telemetry signals, with fancy UIs and a lot of presets. Why people don't use them instead of Datadog?

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#64

Post by Cpoll » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

hagen1778 wrote: post #63

My understanding is that with Prometheus+Grafana, and the rest of their stack, you can achieve the same functionality as Datadog (or even more) at much lower costs. But, it requires engineering time to set up these tools, monitor them, build dashboards and alerts. Build an observability platform at home, in other words. But what about other open source solutions that already trying very hard to become an out-of-box s…

> or even more

Grafana isn't quite as featureful as Datadog, though nothing to keep you from getting the job done.

> But, it requires engineering time to set up these tools

At some price point, you have to wonder if it doesn't make more sense to hire engineers to get it just right for your use case. I'd bet that price point is less than $65MM. Hell, you could have people full-time on Grafana to add features you want.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#65

Post by MehdiHK » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

iwovtb wrote: post #55

Observability is expensive. Rip/replace is hard... we built grepr.ai to solve this problem and are seeing 96% reduction in spend from Splunk/Sumo/New Relic/Datadog etc. No change mgt. The result set is: 96% reduction in spend and noise elimination. Pretty compelling.. come check us out. www.grepr.ai

No pricing page? Also how does it compare to Cribl?

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#66

Post by east4ming » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 2:40 AM UTC

Think the other way around, engineers are also a cost, and investment in open-source software is also a cost. If engineers are very cheap, then the company would choose to build it themselves, right?