I feel like Datadog has a great product. I only wish I hadn't had such negative experiences with their sales team.

Yes.... We originally switched to Datadog because we were looking for New Relic alternative, ran across them, signed up for a trial, liked it, the end.

But then like....18 months later we got contacted by our brand new "account manager", who pestered us into a conference call (a bad start!), and then exhibited a simply amazing lack of knowledge of us, our history with Datadog, our current plan and usage, how we're using Datadog, what features we are already using, what features we might find useful, what features Datadog is planning on adding, what features Datadog already has, or indeed, literally anything else about the company they allegedly worked for or the product they were apparently trying to sell.

I was literally telling this sales person "hey, I see you have this feature; it costs a bit more money, but it might solve a problem we have, can you explain to us why we should give your company more money for this feature", and we got so sidetracked trying to explain to the sales person how their own product worked that we never actually got an answer. And that was that; never heard from them again.

I really like Datadog, but it was easily the most frustrating and confusing experience I've ever had talking to a sales person. "Hey, you guys just posted a news article saying Datadog now solves problem X, we have problem X, can you explain how we can give you money in exchange for solving problem X?" Apparently not!

Still love the product, but man, my interactions with them have not been great. (Other than the one disasterous meeting with our account manager, we also have had mixed luck talking to support. They solved the problem eventually, but both times it ended up taking way, WAY more back and forth to get to the bottom of it than I would have expected.)

Hilarious story as it sounded like the salesperson really followed his/her script quite religiously, which is quite unfortunate. I’d expect account managers to listen more than to talk but in general, most do not.

If you‘d like to avoid that, have a look at Instana. None of that outrageous pricing, and the focus is actually more about helping you find issues instead of Graph Porn.

Note that I used to work there, so I’m biased.

>instead of Graph Porn

Thank You. These two words alone describe something I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with these products. Far too much focus on Graphs.

Seems like they share a playbook with newrelic actually. Such a terrible experience, don't make being a customer a pain in my ass.

I'll never try the product for that reason. They spammed me at work, then on LinkedIn, then cold-called my cellphone [which I really hate to be called on by anyone I don't know]. I demanded to be taken off their contact list, and then said they would.

So then a few days later, the same guy called my home phone. I was a bit less polite that time, and perhaps I got my message across, or perhaps he's just run out of ways to try to contact me.

Datadog, you really blew it.

How’d he get your home number?

I don't know about this person, but my name is pretty unique

Enter it into Google and my (former) home number is a click away. And it's only former because I don't have a home phone anymore

There are services that round up all this information and link it that I'm sure sales people would use as well

Yes, there are companies who sell their app which is just a database of contact information and a plugin to link it,

Who knows where those companies got it, but you can sleep soundly knowing you bought it from a “Real company.”

I am pretty sure they are getting it from linkedin. I felt like a conspiracy theorist but I signed myself up for a SIP line and started getting calls on it from Datadog and The Register after I added it to linkedin.

I've never tried Datadog, and I've anti-promoted them at my company because of this.

They somehow scraped my work email from somewhere (only company that managed this so far) and started contacting me once a month with a typical sales pitch.

First one I ignored. Second one I politely emailed back to not contact me. Third one I went through their website and found a data-privacy reporting link, and seemed to get a person that promised that I would be unsubscribed. Fourth one I reported to their DPO that I was invoking my EU rights and requesting that they delete my email address and any other data about me, they apologised and I didnt get an email the next month!...

...The fifth one I reported to my countries GDPR authorities for unauthorised marketing without consent along with copies of all my attempts to get them to stop. That seems to have done it, but I didn't follow-up if that was the nail in the coffin or if they've just given up

Somehow how they got my phone number and started cold calling me once a week for about 3 months before they gave up.

I'll never use Datadog for that reason.

Try Mongodb sales! Those guys were the sleaziest SAAS i have ever dealt with. Not only they constantly called, they messaged to everyone from my company that are my linkedin connection stating they are working with me while it was not the case.

Incredibly annoying LinkedIn doesn’t have the ability block everyone from a specific org. Definitely would pay for an open source tool that does this with my LinkedIn creds.

Presumably they'd just set up a fake profile.

Their spam is one of the worst. They also called a college (unsolicited, of course) and pretended they knew me to get to me. I'll never buy anything from them,

I actually had the opposite experience. Datadog sales team was a breath of fresh air after dealing with New Relic's team.

It was like pulling teeth trying to get pricing for New Relic APM but Datadog reps came with a ton of pricing info

Agreed. NewRelic blew it with us. Simple questions and they always wanted a conference call and never actually answered the questions. We checked out DataDog and explained I was happy with the list prices and please don’t bother me. So far so good.

Yeah, my experience has been similar. We are finally migrating our monitoring/alerting off of DataDog and directly onto CloudWatch because their sales team refused to budge on pricing and demanded the inclusion of features we weren't interested in. That, and they are nowhere near supporting GovCloud environments.

This is part of the product. They are trying to do the impossible, embrace all customer configurations, and failing badly when it comes to the support.

My experience was getting on a call with them where they explained how their new pricing strategy was going to be so much cheaper and great for us and having them present a nice break down showing exactly how. Eventually we asked "say what's this bit at the end here about a marginal cost per metric+tag permutation?" And it was only after this prompting did we find out that given our current and projected usage profile, we were going to end up spending like 20x the quoted price.

In my experience, it was more than that - it was strong arming by sales.

Depends on the sales guys, I guess. We set a hard budget limit and then harassed support and sales to keep us within this limit.

Anyway. We used Datadog for almost half a year already. Looks like they are overcomplicating their offer to the point of no-return.

Time to look for the next market disruptor.

I rage closed that window for downloading a 720p(!) 2.5MB video showing some swooshing squares that takes up the entirety of the "welcome to this content" section. It's one level of disrespect for my time to eat a huge swath of space with a gif, it's a whole other level to put a movie trailer above your blog content just to make squares dance around

In an attempt to rescue this rant with some actual content: one might have interest in the recent series of threads over in r/devops about people's differing experiences between datadog's _product_ and datadog's _organization_. I would guess if there are problems knowing ahead of time how much mere monitoring costs, that "attack surface" grows the more products one attempts to consume from datadog

> one might have interest in the recent series of threads over in r/devops about people's differing experiences between datadog's _product_ and datadog's _organization_.

I briefly tried to find some of these, but I'm not clear on which threads you're referring to. If you have time to post some that'd be interesting to me.

The one I did find was someone complaining about being "scammed" but it seemed pretty clear that they'd enabled an extra paid feature, without understanding the pricing, and it didn't really seem like Datadog did anything wrong... So if that's all people are complaining about it doesn't seem very interesting.

We may be talking about the same thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/i63xxv/datadog_shad... but my take away wasn't from the original poster's story, it was from the numerous replies with their own story about the product being fine but the interactions with the business being suboptimal. I also came into that thread having just heard a similar story last week from an non-reddit source. "..., twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action," as the tale goes.

Even surfing around the new comments _here_ seems to reinforce that same theme, so whatever the next phase is beyond enemy action, I'm pretty sure we've crossed that threshold

you are angry about 2.5mb video, its 2020 pal get a broadband connection

Look buddy sometimes we just want to read some text while we're sitting at a bus stop.

I just moved to Phoenix from Chicago - even in a major US city I'm forced to use DSL by the apartment complex I live in. I didn't think I'd have to check to see if I can get broadband because it seemed insane to think that it wouldn't be available.

Nonetheless, pages with needless weight have become incredibly annoying, inconvenient, and cumbersome. Also, the much of the rest of the US (outside of metro areas) has some really terrible access to decent internet speeds. That's not even to mention anywhere in the rest of the world.

So kindly cool it with your needless condescension. It's unnecessary and contributes nothing.

Hey Neighbor!

  If you can get it... Cox has gigablast available here for about $120/month.  I get about 800ish down and 35ish up.

Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately, the apartment complex has an exclusivity agreement with CenturyLink. Cox and others have expressed willingness to pull cable into my unit, but the management company just won't allow it. It's driving me insane. It's unfortunate that this type of practice is even allowed/legal.

oh wow...That really does suck. I haven't tried any of the WISPs[0]yet, but maybe they would work?

0 like https://www.airfiber.cc/ ??

depending on where they are that might not be that easy

We used DataDog extensively for metrics at my last job. It was awesome, but terribly expensive. Then people wanted to get logs in the same service, so we started rolling that out and it got even more expensive (multiple times competitors like SumoLogic).

Would assume these new features will also come with a hefty pricetag (though for APM it's not like competitors like NewRelic are inexpensive).

Wow. Sumo costs are usually 75-80% of Splunk. Does this allow DataDog to take the crown for “sales rep most likely to arrive in a Bentley?”

I think they have the least expensive logging product available. But you have to

1) Not run the DataDog agent (you can use fluent-bit) 2) Filter logs so they are not indexed (and in some cases not ingested)

Try LogDNA - it's been the cheapest, fastest and more reliable logging service I've used.

https://logdna.com/

Their pricing is greater than Datadog's, particularly if you can filter out any logs before indexing them.

Disagree, DataDog charges at least $0.10 / GB to forward your logs to your S3. For same price, Sumo Logic allows you to have data search on-demand with no rehydrate. Rehydrate will charge you a lot and take time, at Sumo you can query immediate right away.

I would argue Sumo on-demand search is the least expensive logging product on market, yet very feature rich.

Disclaimer: I work at Sumo. All opinions are mine.

Is Sumo Logic available on a month to month basis? All the prices on the pricing page say “multi-year agreement”. I’m also having dificulty figuring out exactly what it will costs, I don’t find the credit system particularly clear.

I’m about to launch a new project and am currently planning to use Datadog (for both metrics and logs, possibly more in time), but would happily consider alternatives, especially if cheaper or with more straightforward pricing, but so far Sumo’s pricing doesn’t look any more straightforward and I’m not able to commit to anything beyond month to month and by my reading of the pricing page, Sumo doesn’t offer that.

I can't even figure out Sumo's pricing by looking at their pricing page. DataDog's pricing page on the other hand is very easy to understand even though it contains 2 aspects (ingest and index). I would note that Data Dog lies about pricing by showing you a 7-day retention setting pricing that isn't actually available.

interesting at a prev job we switched _to_ ddlogs from sumologic because ddlogs was so much cheaper. Enterprise pricing isnt exactly transparent though, so who knows what goes into it.

Yeah, we (by me I mean not me but someone else at my company) ran a pretty extensive process getting offers from the various vendors. SumoLogic may have cut us a nice deal since we were already giving them lots of money and they didn't want to lose us.

Please consider Scalyr: disclosure I work there, but objectively I will be surprised if someone beats us on price, focused log analytics - try and judge for yourself.

https://www.scalyr.com

A small note on the website itself: There is no scrollbar visible, this is a huge UX problem.

Datadog pricing is ridiculously complex. Prepare to not really know how much you're paying and how much you owe and why. It's the AWS of metrics.

If you need an APM I recommend appsignal. Predictable pricing, and easy to use/find the right info you need.

Profiler looks pretty dope. Does anyone know why neither DataDog nor Google Cloud Profiler support C++? Technically Google supports anything if you implement the agent yourself, but none of these tools ship a C++ profiler out of the box.

Regarding Google Cloud Profiler (I'm the PM), this is for a few reasons:

- We have good support for Go, Java, JS, and Python, but are still adding a few features for these languages (MUSL support for Alpine just shipped, still need to add heap profiling for Python)

- C++ isn't as heavily used by our ops tools customers as Go, Java, JS, and Python

- We have several new analysis features in the pipe, and the cost supporting an additional language would slow down the delivery of these

There's no lack of desire to add new languages, but we chose to prioritize completing existing language support and new analytics functionality this year. I'm guessing that the other teams making products in this space face similar constraints and made similar tradeoffs.

Thanks for your perspective. When I was at dropbox I wrote a quick tool that would convert perf data files to cloud profiler protobufs and upload them to google. I really appreciate that the API exists allowing people to use whatever language they want. I'm not a huge fan of the datadog model where you need their agent and they don't have a documented API.

I work on Datadog Continuous Profiler. Thanks :-)

We picked the initial feature set based on a mix of factors including where we expected a lot of demand, what we use internally so could dogfood, and what we could build a great version of most quickly. We’ve got more languages and more features coming!

And feedback on what we’ve got so far or what (else) you want welcome!

These tools are major. The last company I was at extensively planned error budgets and SLAs, but the tooling was very squishy. Seeing the incident board and tooling around monitoring feels like they hit the nail on the head.

I don't know much about Datadog, but it seems like they are building exactly what their customers need.

Recently implemented datadog at a large financial organisation - it does well at focusing on its core features. We had to create a lot of glue to make it enterprise ready - Active directory sync due to it not supporting groups, permission model is poor. If you wanted anything done raise a support ticket rather than with your sales contact too.

I work on authentication and access control at Datadog - we've recently improved the group mapping through SAML and we have a number of features in the permission model that we're excited about. Eager to show it off if you're interested.

I continue to be really impressed by Datadog. They're in the very exciting post-IPO enterprise SaaS phase where they still have startup mojo + the resources of a large company + the need to continually grow and expand.

I feel for the teams that will need to compete against them as they enter new markets, although I expect that their forays will fail at a fairly high rate (as most product line expansions do).

Was reading the whole thread, but got distracted by “post-IPO enterprise SaaS phase”. You won buzzword/corporate bingo ;-)

Heh, yeah. If you have a less buzzwordy way to phrase that I'd be curious to hear it ;-), I think that the description is accurate although upon reflection I'm with you that it feels pulled out of corporate hell.

The only Datadog feature announcement I look forward to is "we've solved our stability issues!".

I am sick of playing the "is our infrastructure or Datadog's on fire?" game at 3 AM whenever I'm on call. I can only imagine the firefighting their engineering teams are dealing with, but for what you pay, I expect better.

Be prepared to pay an arm and leg once you start putting custom metrics into your app.

If I'm understanding correctly, currently "RUM Errors" is not "Error Tracking", and "RUM Errors" only records an error if that RUM session is actually profiled/recorded?

Ie., you have a RUM sample rate less than 100%, so some errors aren't recorded in RUM Errors? Will that be the same situation for "Error Tracking"?

Curious to see what this pricing is.. eg., any client-side errors get auto-included as a RUM session? There's a good amount of bogus browser errors due to incomplete or oddly sandboxed javascript environments.

How does their Incident Management differ to that of Blameless.com which I believe is the current market leader.

so is the "error tracking" feature equivalent to Sentry?

I'd say it's more "how can we ship the simplest version of Sentry possible".

Important to know we do much, much more than what they're offering, for far more than just JavaScript. It's more of a checkbox than a real alternative. Probably useful for companies who just want to buy one tool and not worry about if it's actually what their developers want or need.

Yep, seems very much the same type of thing.

Except more expensive...

Didn't they say it was included for free?

Not that I can see. The article doesn't say it's free or at no additional cost that I can find, so I'll not assume it's either.

Anyone using their APM? why/ why not?

Using it, and would love to roll it out to more of our services, but cost is the big concern for us.

Just to add, I love how easy it is to set up and roll out.

Using it on all of our services, we all love it. Troubleshooting and optimizations are ridiculously simply, there isn't much investigation, APM just tells you what is wrong, saves a lot of Dev time and we'll worth the money IMO

What language? I tried Python Django a year ago and didn't get half the detail NewRelic shows out of the box. Given the much higher price I didn't even bother looking into custom instrumentalization.

But a year has passed, maybe I should give it another try since NewRelic is trying to make everything as hard as possible with their new UI.

We use it and love it, but self-limit its use because $$$$.

We'd be willing to give Datadog more money to use their full suite, but there's no way we could do it at their full price.

I'm using their nodejs apm product. We have had numerous problems with it due to its dependencies (async_hooks)

though tbf, i don't think there is any other way to do apm in nodejs