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Ask HN: What do you run instead of Datadog?

13 points by theorlandog ↗ HN
Datadog has turned into an ever loving piece of shit. I am sick of their sales team grabbing us by the ankles and "Accidentally" charging for services we don't use. Now, this morning they changed something with their AWS integration that is causing 10X the API calls against our accounts (and thus, 10X guardduty costs on our end analyzing those API requests).

I have had enough of their bullshit and want to find a new vendor. What is everyone using for cloud scale logging and monitoring these days that isn't one of Splunk (cost prohibitive), Sumo-Logic (Also assholes), or Datadog?

It would be nice to just self host a service that stored logs in S3 using iceberg format. However, I don't think such a tool exists.

24 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 63.2 ms ] thread
dantodor
OpenObserve
theorlandog
This is new to me. Thank you for sharing. Looks like it hits a lot of notes I am looking for. Excited to keep digging in!
marshughes
I totally understand your frustration with Datadog's issues. How about the combination of Prometheus + Grafana? Prometheus is for monitoring data collection and Grafana is for visual display. They are open - source and free, allowing for flexible customization. Do you have any specific requirements for monitoring metrics and visualization?
pranay01
Check out SigNoz, https://github.com/signoz/signoz

Has metrics, logs and traces in a single app and built natively on OpenTelemetry

Disclaimer : I am a maintainer

thiago_fm
Love it, it's epic. I can't wait to see you folks become very successful!
theorlandog
Thank you for this recommendation. I have heard the name before, but it slipped my mind to really dig in. I am definitely interested here though. Will start to play around and reach out if it looks promising. Do you all sign BAAs?
pranabgohain
Take a look at https://www.kloudmate.com

360 degree observability (Logs, Metrics, Events, Traces) with RUM, in-built Incident Management, full-featured access, unlimited users

PS: I'm associated with them.

oulipo
I've tried highlight.io (I'm not affiliated) which I found quite nice, there is an open-source version, although I tried to spin it and it was complex to get it working, but I'm using their cloud version for now
dengolius
VictoriaMetrics and VictoriaLogs with Grafana for graphs.
TobbenTM
Datadog is a monstrosity, they do so many things, most of which you don't know or don't care about, so which ones do you need?

We ended up going for HyperDX, just because I really favour fast log searches and simple alerts straight to Slack, but many of these Clickhouse-powered observability suites like Signoz, BetterStack, etc will do the job. Just depends how much you want to pay.

Also, I hope you're on OTEL already, since it makes changing providers the most easy task ever.

theorlandog
Thanks for this. Learning my lesson now to standardize on OTEL first. Thanks for the tip.
thiago_fm
I like SigNoz, it isn't as good as Datadog yet, but I can see it growing to be just as good, with a very small bill in comparison to DD, and a more sustainable revenue model.

They need to focus a lot on APM. Most people pay Datadog because of APM. The rest can be done quite well by using ELK stack or any other tools.

pranay01
Thanks for the shoutout for SigNoz and the feedback.

We are actively working on shipping innovative features in this space. btw, we also have our launch week going on currently if you want to have a look :)

https://signoz.io/launch-week/

digikata
We self-host on our own open-source product, but it helps to have a streaming data platform as a product. Not too difficult to write a connector-sink to S3. https://www.fluvio.io/

The caveat is that this is a general purpose data streaming product, so it isn't that opinionated or customized for logging. We still use logging custom frontends for browsing (e.g. grafana), but for core logging/monitoring/billing and critical alerts, it's just Fluvio.

Been looking at the https://coroot.com ebpf collectors to see if we can replace our sidecar sources recently.

agentzero000
Really depends on the scale you are running at
scarface_74
You can always just use the native AWS services around CloudWatch alarms and metrics
ivandorian
Datadog’s antics are a headache, but I'm stuck with Splunk due to corporate compliance and security demands. We keep the costs in check by funneling our logs through Cribl. In my experience, most companies end up juggling Splunk, Wazuh, and some custom SecOps setups—no silver bullet, just a series of compromises that keep the auditors happy.