We use OpenDNS (now Cisco Umbrella) at work. I'm often hit with Umbrella pages denying access to random websites. The usual message is that the site "distributes malware", but none of the sites it blocks actually deserve that block. Our security team says they can manually add exceptions, but they have no visibility into why Umbrella blocks particular sites.
We used Meraki WiFi APs at a previous office, and they were abysmal. We had networking consultants come in several times to do site surveys and attempt to fix things, but we were still plagued with connection drops, poor throughput, and weird dead areas that made no sense. Eventually we trashed the Meraki gear and went with one of Cisco's other product lines, and everything works quite well now. (Well, now we just have issues with macOS being terrible at WiFi radio management.)
I don't have any experience with the other two. I also didn't have experience with OpenDNS or Meraki pre-acquisition, so it's possible they've always been bad products, and Cisco has either maintained status quo, or made them better but still bad.
We use another firewall solution and it happens just as frequently with some sites getting caught up in our malware filter. The initial bad sites lists are originally crowdsourced, I believe.
I've used Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, and Cisco Aironet and have had no problems with any of them. They all have a duty cycle and radios don't last indefinitely. Usually what I find is someone brings in an old Linksys G-band AP and that squelches an area, the older radios are a lot noisier.
They may be great, but are they 7.8 billion dollars of great? For comparison, Hanes (the underwear people) has a 6 billion market cap and Dish Network is 18 billion.
The $15 a host thing was only true before they started charging for custom metrics. Now they want you to add APM to your plan and it's much more expensive.
I'm transitioning off of DataDog right now because of this change. My contract came up for renewal and they want to charge me a TON more because of my custom metrics.
All my custom metrics do is track the time of each request. It's basically APM but I've had it setup for years, way before they rolled out APM. So yeah, $15 a host would be awesome if that's actually what the price was. But why would you pay $15 a host and only get CPU/memory charts? That stuff is built into AWS... So I'm not even sure what the $15 gets you that is actually useful.
Although fair enough in general, New Relic is public with a market cap of $3.5b, and given my experiences with New Relic and Datadog, I wouldn't be surprised if Datadog was easily worth twice New Relic. :) (Certainly they're a lot more than twice as nice to use...)
I would imagine a non-trivial amount of revenue for most SaaS businesses is highly dependent on VC-funded startups. If VC money dries up, expect all SaaS businesses to suffer.
I always wonder in these situations if there is a counter of the form, "Sure, we'll take the cash, up front please, and nobody on the team will be required to go with the company."
Most people assume that this sort of demand would 'kill the deal' but sometimes there are exceptions.
The reason I wonder about this is because it could create what is essentially a very wealthy core team that can already work well together which could then self-fund their next thing without all the hassle of fundraising etc.
I suppose they can do that post IPO as well, but the IPO adds a bunch of work that can really take the 'fun' out of running a company.
I'm not a millionaire but I play golf and belong to a prestigious country club (US Open and Ryder Cup host) with plenty of millionaires in the membership list. Sitting at the bar over the years and chatting with these folks that don't need to work a lot of them do work for a handful of reasons:
1. They're bored and want some challenge.
2. They can't stand being near their wife, husband or kids.
3. They like making money.
4. They're genuinely passionate about whatever niche topic they picked to focus on.
You can only use your toys so much before they get boring.
The mind of a person who can't seem to find something to do outside of work just doesn't make sense to me. Work is the thing in my life that most gets in the way of me doing things.
> The mind of a person who can't seem to find something to do outside of work just doesn't make sense to me.
Why not? There are all sorts of extremely popular business and government simulation games, dating all the way back to Lemonade Stand on the Apple II to SimCity, to Railroad Tycoon, to Sid Meier's Civilization series. These guys are just doing it in real life.
The same applies for engineering and research jobs: why play Kerbal Space Simulator when you're capable of building something amazing in the real world?
> Why work at all when I can drive my Ferrari collection, all damn day.
That's fun for a week, maybe even a month, then you'd get bored. Humans need purpose and we like structure. Complete freedom terrifies and unsettles us.
Source: All my life I wanted nothing but to have enough cash in bank to take a year off and do whatever. When I got it ... at first I panicked, then I considered the boundless possibilities, then realized I have no idea what to do with that much money, put it in index funds, and went back to work. Now it sits there as a source of comfort and potential.
A modest fuck you fund that makes me feel better and gives me that sense of Oh yeah, if I stop liking my situation, I can afford to do whatever I want for a year or two without compromising my lifestyle
You'd not be at zero. Everyone's different but when I look back on my life, I treasure the travel I did and its been a regular influence on my perspective of the world ever since. I would love to have a year of FU money but... I don't think I would part with my travel history for it.
Purpose and structure doesn't have to come from a job. I took 2 years off, and then spent another 2 years working on a startup without getting paid for most of it, and it was one of the most fulfilling things I've done.
This is what I have been doing for the past 13 months, living on saving and building my dream startup... It's going ok, we are launching out first version before the end of the year, after about 6 months of delays.
I dunno, man, I think everyone's different. I'm planning on retiring (early) within the next few years. Obviously I won't know for sure until I've been retired for a bit, but I can't imagine ever wanting to have a job again.
I enjoy my current job, but it's still a job. I have people to answer to, politics to deal with, work that I dislike that I have to do in order to do the work that I do like, frustrating people who I have to work with sometimes... the usual.
If that just went away, and I could choose what to do with every moment of my time, and associate with who I wanted, and focus on passions rather than work I don't care about... that would be the best.
I took four months off last year and it was absolutely incredible. Even to the point where when I was (very rarely) bored, I even enjoyed being bored. Sure, four months isn't a year, or ten years, or 40 years, but it just felt like the right way to live. In a weird way it actually felt more structured; I actually planned things with friends (or by myself) at particular times, stuck to the things I'd committed to, exercised more, cooked more, and just felt so unhurried and relaxed all the time.
I am with you, I don't know why people are so scared about not going to work.
Due to some lucky events I was able to maintain some fairly large custom ERP system. After few inital years all the big problems were fixed and I was keeping eye on it for next 10 years. In reality it meant about 1 or 2 hours of work every (other) month and I was paid enough to be confortable, not that much, but enough to live the life I wanted. Kind of universal income reality.
What do you think? Did I missed going to the office? Was I depressed because I haven't been climbing corporate ladder? Nah, it was awesome.
I spent few years traveling, I worked on more then 50 projects (SW and HW), I tried to launch few startups and helped couple VC funded companies, I've even bought farm and and was fortunate to spend a few years with my newly born kids without constantly thinking about some deadlines that was not imposed by me. I never felt like I was wasting my life, quite oposite: I had so much time for exploring various projects and learn new skill and I didn't need to think about will-that-make-it-me-some-money type of questions.
I am currently working normal job (well, it remote and 4-days a week, but still) writing software for banks, telcos and other corporations and it just didn't filled me with purpose or self-actualisation.
> I tried to launch few startups and helped couple VC funded companies, I've even bought farm and and was fortunate to spend a few years with my newly born kids without constantly thinking about some deadlines that was not imposed by me.
> A modest fuck you fund that makes me feel better and gives me that sense of Oh yeah, if I stop liking my situation, I can afford to do whatever I want for a year or two without compromising my lifestyle
I think this is the main goal that people pursuing wealth want to achieve; moving from HAVING to work to WANTING to work. I mean I'm at a stage myself where I can comfortably take a few months, probably up to a year off using my savings; it's making me a lot less attached to my current job, and makes me look a bit more critically at it and at what else is on the market. And it makes me consider working less hours or taking less pay in favor of more enjoyment in my job. (no luck yet in that regard, lol)
I guess I was exaggerating a tad bit, you can have a Ferrari for 3k per month, after all it's just a car and your back would hurt literally driving it all day. I was think that mundane things like running to the Post Office or picking kid up from school would be a blast because all trips start and end with a roar. Of course you have to be a car person, some people would get the same feeling from riding their bicycle.
That gets old, really fast (source: my experience hobnobbing w/the wealthy). If you've not noticed the trend, the rich now want to climb mountains, run ultras etc. I think it's hard to turn off the type A personalities that enabled them to get where they got to in the first place
Caveat: that's the rich who are self-made. The rich who are 2nd/3rd generation on the other hand, can spend money like there's no tomorrow (source: my experience hobnobbing w/the wealthy haha), and an entire industry has grown to "suport" their needs (swiss watch not enough? here's a swiss watch with diamonds... cartier diamonds, thank you very much. $20 organic, grass fed burger not good enough? here's a truffle infused, foie gras embedded burger for $100, TYVM... ad nauseum).
There's plenty of examples. Stewart Butterfield, the entire PayPal mafia, etc. If you were right, Slack, LinkedIn, SpaceX, YouTube and Yelp wouldn't exist.
In my experience in Silicon Valley it’s more like drive the Ferrari on weekends. One weekend a coworker at Sun invited me to come up to sears point raceway and drive my rx7 on the track.
I showed up and there were a handful of people, turns out the coworker had rented the whole track (and skid pad) for the weekend for “trying out” different driving moves. I expect it cost them less than $100,000 for the weekend.
But the engineer in question here probably had a net worth of more than $50M and yet they came into work every day and built cool stuff.
Now the Sun case was more “typical” of the valley at the time where a company goes public and now there are lots of millionaires in the ranks. Same thing at Google when they went public, and Facebook. In my experience it is the unusual case that the newly wealthy person quits work and pursues a life of idle hedonism.
Not saying that it doesn’t happen, just saying that there is an alternative response to being wealthy.
> A core team of pre-millionaires won't necessarily, or even likely, work the same as a core team of post-millionaires.
At the maturity of a company like Datadog post-would-be-acquisition is all about cross-selling your product into existing enterprise accounts, not necessarily enhancing the product. So this woulda actually save them money.
Say what you want about Oracle, but this is their modus operandi and it's worked.*
*- asterisk bc they have to continually do it like a treadmill in order to stay afloat.
The answer to your question is that it depends on how big the discount the core team is willing to take to do so.
They will usually need to take a discount because as a buyer the risk increases if the whole core team is bailing. Which makes sense. In and of itself there is more than a hint of information arbitrage on part of the seller if everyone is cashing out and moving on.
What else are you paying $7B for if not the people? If I’m an acquiring company, I’m not optimizing for creating a very wealthy team that will leave and create another company. I want that team to work for me.
What else are you paying $7B for if not the people?
Access to customers. User data. To remove a competitor from the market. Patents. Because the CEOs bonus depends on market share. To enter a new regional market.
There are lots of reasons to buy a company. Aquihiring the team is just one.
And it's surely a risky reason to be the only (or main) one, you should probably assume a good chunk will leave immediately, and another chunk after 6m-1y, I'd have thought.
I've heard it said that there is a line of business wherein you buy a software company, cut costs as much as possible, and start milking existing customers. The company you buy will not grow, or be expected to last many years, but the years that they do last will be highly profitable. Enough to cover the cost of buying the business and make a nice profit along the way.
I am very keen on picking up some $DDOG shares tomorrow when it IPO'S. As part of my DevOps consultancy I recommend DataDog to nearly all my clients. They check all the boxes in one unified platform:
They can give you discounts that makes licensing costs acceptable, if you have something like 10,000 devices.
The pricing isn't unreasonable, but it adds up pretty quickly if you have lots of devices. The issue isn't unique to Datadog, other similar service have the same pricing structure and price levels.
Do you manually configure these in the web UI? I wasn't able to find an API or repo sync for these last time I looked, and it doesn't seem feasible to manually make sets of synthetics for every environment we manage.
For most companies it's either very difficult or unattractive to acquire a controlling stake without negotiating a deal with the company's management. The alternative is a hostile takeover which requires enticing shareholders with above-market tender offers. Hostile takeovers become borderline impossible if a company like Datadog has implemented a poison pill as part of their shareholder rights plan. Yet another alternative is a creeping takeover wherein Cisco would try to gain a controlling interest by gradually buying shares on the open market, but this can take a very long time.
Interesting since Cisco already owns AppDynamics. Apparently they think or even know AppDynamics is not good enough to compete with Datadog. Very bad news for AppDynamics.
I interviewed there a year ago - the person on the phone told me I was an idiot for using Cassandra when I should be using HBase like they were; ok, lol
People seem to generally have very positive comments on DataDog - maybe it's me but I've generally found it frustrating. The sampling and retention rates for tracing mean I rarely see the errors that actually matter. I dislike not having an actual date/time picker in the APM section too.
Either way, I've had a worse experience with Cisco products so good for them saying no.
> People seem to generally have very positive comments on DataDog - maybe it's me but I've generally found it frustrating.
We hadn't used DataDog, but after our whole team kept getting endless semi personalised buddy buddy like spam from their sales people, we all swore off ever even contemplating using them.
I think agent based monitoring product companies like Datadog doing very good and selling the company eventually. The problem they solve is perennial and there is no Amazon/Google in this domain. Early example I saw is boundary acquired by BMC. One company I worked earlier where we built agentless monitoring.
Why do you think Amazon/Google is not in the same space - with Cloudwatch, X-ray and other similar tools from Google - they are in the same space - even though the egress cost associated with Amazon/Google are low for constant data export from your server.. If I was looking from security perspective - its easier to integrate internally when you are running on any of the cloud providers
Wow. They got offered over 7 Billion dollars, in the face of a looming recession, strong industry competitors, and an uncertain IPO. They're willing to gamble their future, just because they want more than 7 Billion dollars. I guess when you're offered that much money, it's hard not to get greedy.
Interesting given the prior acquisition of AppDynamics. If true, I think they should have taken the deal.
My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there appeared to be an upper limit to how much companies were willing to spend on APM and related technologies that caps the opportunity. In general, the charging per agent/server model runs into trouble on big infrastructure - do I cover production? What about staging? If I don't cover staging, then am I creating a testing/QA problem? Etc. It just becomes a much tougher sell when you get over $500k. Hell, over $200k. I would regularly hear companies say things like "well, we can cover half of production because I can't bring that to our CEO - he'll freak."
So I think that might be part of what we're seeing with New Relic's recent revenue performance (they recently cut guidance on full year revenue). New Relic does about $600m a year and is valued at $3.5b - their max value was about 2x that - so $7b.
Caveats:
- Are they growing faster? Absolutely.
- Are they a great company? Absolutely.
- Does taking the deal and giving up full control of your company always make sense? Of course not.
- Is money the only metric of success? No of course not.
- Does it matter when you're talking billions? Probably not.
Yep, and a ton of rapidly growing competitors in the overall it ops space (scalyr, kentik, honeycomb, grafana, riverbed, and probably 10 more, and even bigger dev efforts at Google/AWS/MS) means a race to the bottom revenue wise and many easy alternatives for sub-1B acquisition (im guessing most will be < 50M for the startups or say 6X on revenue for bigger, if you are considering working at one and need to value stock growth)
Unpopular take incoming ... but I find DataDog useless. I’m biased as I’m a DBA and comprehensive workload metrics are what I need, but the broad use of DataDog or AppDynamics or NewRelic really do data layer performance monitoring a tremendous disservice. Good luck for Cisco that they were shot down.
What do you use as a DBA? I see some DBA's turn to Toad, but I'm not a domain expert in that direction so I don't know what the go-to's are these days.
Anecdotal: one of my teammates used AppDynamics to track down that our Oracle DBA didn't enable the fix for the LOB extent allocation bug (#6376915) in our 12c database, which manifested as an application performance issue and the DBA team insisted there was nothing wrong on the Oracle layer. I'm thus interested in what DBA's use to monitor so I can better monitor the databases I rely upon myself.
106 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadWe use OpenDNS (now Cisco Umbrella) at work. I'm often hit with Umbrella pages denying access to random websites. The usual message is that the site "distributes malware", but none of the sites it blocks actually deserve that block. Our security team says they can manually add exceptions, but they have no visibility into why Umbrella blocks particular sites.
We used Meraki WiFi APs at a previous office, and they were abysmal. We had networking consultants come in several times to do site surveys and attempt to fix things, but we were still plagued with connection drops, poor throughput, and weird dead areas that made no sense. Eventually we trashed the Meraki gear and went with one of Cisco's other product lines, and everything works quite well now. (Well, now we just have issues with macOS being terrible at WiFi radio management.)
I don't have any experience with the other two. I also didn't have experience with OpenDNS or Meraki pre-acquisition, so it's possible they've always been bad products, and Cisco has either maintained status quo, or made them better but still bad.
I've used Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, and Cisco Aironet and have had no problems with any of them. They all have a duty cycle and radios don't last indefinitely. Usually what I find is someone brings in an old Linksys G-band AP and that squelches an area, the older radios are a lot noisier.
https://github.com/iamadamdev
I'm transitioning off of DataDog right now because of this change. My contract came up for renewal and they want to charge me a TON more because of my custom metrics.
All my custom metrics do is track the time of each request. It's basically APM but I've had it setup for years, way before they rolled out APM. So yeah, $15 a host would be awesome if that's actually what the price was. But why would you pay $15 a host and only get CPU/memory charts? That stuff is built into AWS... So I'm not even sure what the $15 gets you that is actually useful.
Or if you realy want to dig deep into api data (like how often is send a credit request with which data) look into axway decisions insight.
My no money side project startup has 5 micro instances and could not imagine paying $75 per month
There is a free tier (up to 5 hosts I think), but yeah. It's that expensive and still people use it!
Most people assume that this sort of demand would 'kill the deal' but sometimes there are exceptions.
The reason I wonder about this is because it could create what is essentially a very wealthy core team that can already work well together which could then self-fund their next thing without all the hassle of fundraising etc.
I suppose they can do that post IPO as well, but the IPO adds a bunch of work that can really take the 'fun' out of running a company.
1. They're bored and want some challenge.
2. They can't stand being near their wife, husband or kids.
3. They like making money.
4. They're genuinely passionate about whatever niche topic they picked to focus on.
You can only use your toys so much before they get boring.
In fact all my friends who had depression or committed suicide didn't have any responsibility really. I didn't see this pattern for a while though.
Why not? There are all sorts of extremely popular business and government simulation games, dating all the way back to Lemonade Stand on the Apple II to SimCity, to Railroad Tycoon, to Sid Meier's Civilization series. These guys are just doing it in real life.
The same applies for engineering and research jobs: why play Kerbal Space Simulator when you're capable of building something amazing in the real world?
This has yet to be proven. We need an experiment.
That's fun for a week, maybe even a month, then you'd get bored. Humans need purpose and we like structure. Complete freedom terrifies and unsettles us.
Source: All my life I wanted nothing but to have enough cash in bank to take a year off and do whatever. When I got it ... at first I panicked, then I considered the boundless possibilities, then realized I have no idea what to do with that much money, put it in index funds, and went back to work. Now it sits there as a source of comfort and potential.
A modest fuck you fund that makes me feel better and gives me that sense of Oh yeah, if I stop liking my situation, I can afford to do whatever I want for a year or two without compromising my lifestyle
Knowing you can always walk away from a job, project, or client is quite intoxicating.
> Yeah but then I’d be at zero
You'd not be at zero. Everyone's different but when I look back on my life, I treasure the travel I did and its been a regular influence on my perspective of the world ever since. I would love to have a year of FU money but... I don't think I would part with my travel history for it.
I enjoy my current job, but it's still a job. I have people to answer to, politics to deal with, work that I dislike that I have to do in order to do the work that I do like, frustrating people who I have to work with sometimes... the usual.
If that just went away, and I could choose what to do with every moment of my time, and associate with who I wanted, and focus on passions rather than work I don't care about... that would be the best.
I took four months off last year and it was absolutely incredible. Even to the point where when I was (very rarely) bored, I even enjoyed being bored. Sure, four months isn't a year, or ten years, or 40 years, but it just felt like the right way to live. In a weird way it actually felt more structured; I actually planned things with friends (or by myself) at particular times, stuck to the things I'd committed to, exercised more, cooked more, and just felt so unhurried and relaxed all the time.
We'll see, I guess.
Due to some lucky events I was able to maintain some fairly large custom ERP system. After few inital years all the big problems were fixed and I was keeping eye on it for next 10 years. In reality it meant about 1 or 2 hours of work every (other) month and I was paid enough to be confortable, not that much, but enough to live the life I wanted. Kind of universal income reality.
What do you think? Did I missed going to the office? Was I depressed because I haven't been climbing corporate ladder? Nah, it was awesome.
I spent few years traveling, I worked on more then 50 projects (SW and HW), I tried to launch few startups and helped couple VC funded companies, I've even bought farm and and was fortunate to spend a few years with my newly born kids without constantly thinking about some deadlines that was not imposed by me. I never felt like I was wasting my life, quite oposite: I had so much time for exploring various projects and learn new skill and I didn't need to think about will-that-make-it-me-some-money type of questions.
I am currently working normal job (well, it remote and 4-days a week, but still) writing software for banks, telcos and other corporations and it just didn't filled me with purpose or self-actualisation.
All of that _is_ work, just in a different form.
In my case when somebody asked me and I haven't have had much going on I did it, but I haven't chased anything.
I think this is the main goal that people pursuing wealth want to achieve; moving from HAVING to work to WANTING to work. I mean I'm at a stage myself where I can comfortably take a few months, probably up to a year off using my savings; it's making me a lot less attached to my current job, and makes me look a bit more critically at it and at what else is on the market. And it makes me consider working less hours or taking less pay in favor of more enjoyment in my job. (no luck yet in that regard, lol)
Caveat: that's the rich who are self-made. The rich who are 2nd/3rd generation on the other hand, can spend money like there's no tomorrow (source: my experience hobnobbing w/the wealthy haha), and an entire industry has grown to "suport" their needs (swiss watch not enough? here's a swiss watch with diamonds... cartier diamonds, thank you very much. $20 organic, grass fed burger not good enough? here's a truffle infused, foie gras embedded burger for $100, TYVM... ad nauseum).
I showed up and there were a handful of people, turns out the coworker had rented the whole track (and skid pad) for the weekend for “trying out” different driving moves. I expect it cost them less than $100,000 for the weekend.
But the engineer in question here probably had a net worth of more than $50M and yet they came into work every day and built cool stuff.
Now the Sun case was more “typical” of the valley at the time where a company goes public and now there are lots of millionaires in the ranks. Same thing at Google when they went public, and Facebook. In my experience it is the unusual case that the newly wealthy person quits work and pursues a life of idle hedonism.
Not saying that it doesn’t happen, just saying that there is an alternative response to being wealthy.
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
At the maturity of a company like Datadog post-would-be-acquisition is all about cross-selling your product into existing enterprise accounts, not necessarily enhancing the product. So this woulda actually save them money.
Say what you want about Oracle, but this is their modus operandi and it's worked.*
*- asterisk bc they have to continually do it like a treadmill in order to stay afloat.
They will usually need to take a discount because as a buyer the risk increases if the whole core team is bailing. Which makes sense. In and of itself there is more than a hint of information arbitrage on part of the seller if everyone is cashing out and moving on.
Access to customers. User data. To remove a competitor from the market. Patents. Because the CEOs bonus depends on market share. To enter a new regional market.
There are lots of reasons to buy a company. Aquihiring the team is just one.
Uhhhh, customers?
[X] Server / cloud resource monitoring and alerting [https://www.datadoghq.com/dashboarding/]
[X] Logging [https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/]
[X] APM (application performance) [https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/]
[X] HTTP/API endpoint checks and alerts [https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/]
The pricing isn't unreasonable, but it adds up pretty quickly if you have lots of devices. The issue isn't unique to Datadog, other similar service have the same pricing structure and price levels.
Big difference in commentary in today’s thread and following one
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782870
Do you manually configure these in the web UI? I wasn't able to find an API or repo sync for these last time I looked, and it doesn't seem feasible to manually make sets of synthetics for every environment we manage.
Either way, I've had a worse experience with Cisco products so good for them saying no.
We hadn't used DataDog, but after our whole team kept getting endless semi personalised buddy buddy like spam from their sales people, we all swore off ever even contemplating using them.
My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there appeared to be an upper limit to how much companies were willing to spend on APM and related technologies that caps the opportunity. In general, the charging per agent/server model runs into trouble on big infrastructure - do I cover production? What about staging? If I don't cover staging, then am I creating a testing/QA problem? Etc. It just becomes a much tougher sell when you get over $500k. Hell, over $200k. I would regularly hear companies say things like "well, we can cover half of production because I can't bring that to our CEO - he'll freak."
So I think that might be part of what we're seeing with New Relic's recent revenue performance (they recently cut guidance on full year revenue). New Relic does about $600m a year and is valued at $3.5b - their max value was about 2x that - so $7b.
Caveats: - Are they growing faster? Absolutely. - Are they a great company? Absolutely. - Does taking the deal and giving up full control of your company always make sense? Of course not. - Is money the only metric of success? No of course not. - Does it matter when you're talking billions? Probably not.
Anecdotal: one of my teammates used AppDynamics to track down that our Oracle DBA didn't enable the fix for the LOB extent allocation bug (#6376915) in our 12c database, which manifested as an application performance issue and the DBA team insisted there was nothing wrong on the Oracle layer. I'm thus interested in what DBA's use to monitor so I can better monitor the databases I rely upon myself.