Thanks for your suggestions on better ways to support self hosting! I agree we need to do a much better job here.

We chose Kafka and Druid because: 1. Any company which reaches a decent scale invariably uses some form of Kafka. And it is a trusted system which scales upto huge scale. 2. Community adoption and support. When choosing datastore, we also evaluated Apache Pinot & Clickhouse, but Druid seemed to have the best community. Also, it was proven to use at scale in places like Lyft

I agree though that these are not simple systems, and may be too much for smaller orgs. We are also evaluating supporting simpler datastores, but that would depend on what the community demands. Our architecture is modular so we are not strictly tied to druid and we can support other datastores if there is interest.

I agree with your point around integrations. That is one of the moats of DataDog in my opinion. Agree to the usefulness of integrations for PagerDuty/Slack. I have added an issue for this - https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/issues/21#issue-804860212

Though we are hoping being an open source projects, our community would be able to create integrations. Have answered this in more detail in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26080530