Datadog, thank you for blocking us

Edit: a couple of comments pointed out that the blog does mention paying Datadog. Leaving my comment as is below, because I still find the whole interaction weird. It makes me wonder if the story is fabricated.

> we lost visibility into production systems that depend fundamentally on continuous observability signals to operate safely.

The Datadog message implies that Deductive wasn't paying for any service from Datadog: "We've noticed you're actively evaluating Datadog" and "our Master Subscription Agreement that you accepted by using our service".

And Deductive apparently did this from Feb to Dec 2025. Quite a long time for a free evaluation, but perhaps they were just using the very limited free tier?

It's a little strange to be relying on a free tier or evaluation for "production systems that depend fundamentally on continuous observability". Presumably it couldn't have been that important to Deductive, otherwise they would have paid for the service they were "depending fundamentally" on.

> First, our Datadog bills were steep, roughly 2-3x of what we would otherwise expect to pay for equivalent telemetry storage and retention.

The blog says they were paying(?)

> Two things, however, were consistently true throughout our usage. First, our Datadog bills were steep, roughly 2-3x of what we would otherwise expect to pay for equivalent telemetry storage and retention. Second, despite the richness of the platform, we rarely used Datadog for anything beyond being a reliable system of record for logs, metrics, and traces. We were paying for workflows we almost never touched.

This paragraph from the article makes it clear otherwise.

Thanks, I missed that. Strange message from Datadog then. Assuming it’s real.

Logging, tracing, observability, and control plane (flags, etc.) should be open.

We built 100% in-house pieces for all of this at a major fintech a decade ago. Everything worked and single teams could manage these systems.

Someone in leadership said we had to get rid of all "weirdware". Open solutions weren't robust, so we went commerical.

SignalFX got acquired, immediately 10x'd our prices and put all hands on deck to migrate. Unscheduled, stressful, bullshit. We missed the migration date and had to pay anyway.

LaunchDarkly promised us the moon to replace the system my team built. It didn't work with Ruby, Go, and the Java client sucked. It couldn't sync online changes at runtime like our five nines distributed and fault tolerant system could. We had to upstream a ton of code. And their system still sucked by the time I left the project.

These systems need to be open and owned by us. Managed is okay, but they shouldn't be proprietary offerings.

I could extend that one step further to cloud itself, but that's an argument for another day.