Maybe we are too small but Datadog is one of the few vendors which we haven't been able to negotiate down in years. The price has always been whats on the website. I honestly don't even mind, with some vendors it feels like you are on a basar and they always tell you that their final discountns had to get approval by the CEO.
Compared to most Enterprise vendors it is a lot harder to get a discount from Datadog. Most vendors will give you 1/3 off just for signing a contract and committing to a spend, Datadog is not like that.
We spend a few thousand a month with Datadog and our account manager reaches out every quarter to adjust our monthly commit up/down which provides a 20% discount (I think) or so off from the website prices.
I am one of the maintainers. We are building a DataDog alternative with native support for opentelemetry.
Hopefully someone else will contribute the notebooks feature. Those are very useful.
Something that DD is not careful about, is being able to consistently use UTC for all time labels in all graphs (and maybe a quick way to convert to a local time if we need to communicate with stakeholders).
(I don't know why your comment was downvoted).
Thanks for the point about Notebooks, we have not thought in detail on how people use that. Is it primarily to collaborate between team members when an incident happens or even when there is no incident, and you are analysing stuff
- Incidents, collecting different metrics and showing them next to each other, with comments
- Longer-term reliability debugging. They can form a kind of ad-hoc dashboard. These are usually issues that degrade performance, don't have immediate or wide-spread customer impact, and are things we are not immediately able to detect
- Related, performance tuning. Sometimes, the key metric is unknown. We want to explore it, and then make changes to infra, and then see if that moved the needle
- Sometimes, the ad-hoc widgets are useful enough to export to a dashboard
- I can take any widget anywhere else and import it into a notebook, or start a new notebook out of it.
The notebooks are similar to the dashboard, just that, the layout engine only allows a linear notebook layout instead of a grid. There are already text widgets, though the button to add that is easier to access. Other than the comments, it's basically a dashboard with the UI changed so that it feels like a notebook.
Keep in mind too, all dashboard and notebooks modify timestamps and other states in the browser URL, so it is easy for me to copy-paste those into Slack so that other people can see what I am seeing.
As-is we go through a song and dance whenever we look at logs and metrics “oh, this happened at X time which is Y time for most people.
When we talk to stakeholders and customer-facing folks though, tend to convert it to local time.
From the perspective of a customer, I can tell you that DD already has quite a bit of a moat. Their main competitive advantage, and what got us into using it, is being able to correlate data across APM, custom metrics, and logging through the use of tagging. They then densely link data together across the platform. There is also a built-in Jupyter-style notebooks. By correlating data like that, you get more value out of ingesting as much data into DD as you can. There are some additional services we're not using, such as auto-correlation with ML (and alerting for anomaly detection), and security monitoring that also looks across the entire platform using their ML tech.
Like AWS/GCP/Azure, it can get expensive, quite fast, using on-demand pricing, so there are negotiated annual contracts. Right now, our team is small, and to replicate the functionality we do use, using self-hosted open-source tooling, we might as well hire another engineer for just setting up and maintaining such a platform.
I get it that, you want to defend the moat and that eroding the little things can lead to eroding the big things. As I see it though, if you need those correlations, you'll need a certain scale and team size before it makes sense to build out something like that for yourself.