[HN Gopher] Translate Datadog Metrics into OTLP
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Translate Datadog Metrics into OTLP
        
       Author : buro9
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2024-06-18 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (grafana.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (grafana.com)
        
       | MuffinFlavored wrote:
       | I'd be curious to know how many organizations once they get on
       | DataDog get off of it, despite it probably easily costing $40k/mo
       | between log ingestion/indexing, span/trace/APM storage, monitors,
       | etc. for smaller tech companies.
       | 
       | Yes, you can do it all yourself open-source, invest engineer time
       | to keep it all running. Pay for cloud infrastructure, run
       | DataDog-like/clone UIs...
       | 
       | There's just something about paying top dollar to get the "crem
       | de la crem". That isn't to say that there's just a certain level
       | of polish missing from all open-source alternatives (some of them
       | probably even strive to be drop-in replacements/turnkey)
       | 
       | but DataDog is a $40b company for a reason I guess?
       | 
       | That 1-5% of polish missing from opensource is worth $40b I
       | guess? Is that a good number to represent "what is missing in
       | 'free' solutions versus DataDog"? 5%? Might be underselling it.
        
         | andrewstuart2 wrote:
         | I think the big reason they're so huge is they make it easy to
         | onboard alllll your data, and incentivise you financially to
         | stick with all their custom tooling and instrumentation. So the
         | "quick wins" have a long tail of financial scaling. As your own
         | scale grows, your DD costs grow. And so you do a few things
         | that may entrench you further to drop your costs and the sunk
         | cost fallacy helps corner you. You need your dashboards and
         | alerts now that you're bigger, so you aren't thrilled about the
         | prospect of rebuilding from scratch.
         | 
         | Anyway, I know this because I've been there at a former
         | employer. We started off (and mostly stayed) otel at the base
         | layers, but more and more had to move to proprietary DD
         | collectors/agents for off-the-shelf system metrics (db, cloud,
         | VMs, k8s, etc), because otherwise they were custom metrics and
         | very very expensive.
         | 
         | So they're very very sticky. And the market loves a sticky +
         | expensive vendor.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | > Yes, you can do it all yourself open-source, invest engineer
         | time to keep it all running. Pay for cloud infrastructure, run
         | DataDog-like/clone UIs
         | 
         | This stuff is table stakes for any competent ops person and we
         | can spin this whole stack up in our sleep. You do it at every
         | job. It's cheap to run and maintain as well. This isn't to say
         | that Datadog can't be worth it but $40k/mo will get you the
         | whole stack plus 35 hrs/wk each of a senior and junior SRE that
         | can work on other projects.
         | 
         | If you're swimming in cash and want the best at any price then
         | hell yeah do it, DD is unbelievably polished. But if you're at
         | all cost sensitive it's a bit of a catch-22 because if you have
         | enough infrastructure to warrant DD then you likely have an ops
         | team that can do it themselves.
        
           | skrtskrt wrote:
           | a lot of the open source stuff has click to deploy setups in
           | AWS & GCP too
        
         | m-o11y wrote:
         | This has been a constant source of friction between build vs
         | buy, esp. when talking about day 1 operations, which is why at
         | OpsVerse (https://opsverse.io/), built out ObserveNow, a fully
         | managed, OSS based observability platform built for enterprise
         | scale. So you don't have to tie yourself into a walled garden,
         | can run pretty much any exporter to bring in data to the system
         | (or take out), and always have access to the tooling that
         | powers your platform without needing to babysit the
         | observability platform itself as you grow.
         | 
         | And since it's purely ingestion based pricing, in general it
         | works out a LOT cheaper as well.
         | 
         | explicit disclaimer: I work at OpsVerse
        
         | skrtskrt wrote:
         | Grafana has hosted cloud offerings for metrics/logs/traces and
         | some other stuff that come in waaaaay under DataDog costs.
         | 
         | The super-integrated UI polish type work isn't up to DataDog's
         | level but considering it's a way cheaper option to still not
         | have to run it yourself, it's a good option.
        
       | mikeshi42 wrote:
       | This is really exciting since the Otel collector already supports
       | Datadog tracing, adding metrics will cover the big two signals
       | that make it hard for most teams to shift from DD's walled
       | garden. I suspect this will really ease the migration path from
       | closed standards to open for a whole swath of companies now.
       | 
       | Hopefully the PRs get upstreamed quickly without any opposition
       | from Datadog unlike last time.
       | 
       | std disclaimer: I'm building oss obs for hyperdx, so I have a
       | clear horse in the race for companies adopting open standards,
       | just like grafana.
        
         | KnlnKS wrote:
         | Wait, the Otel collector supports Datadog tracing? Do you have
         | a link to docs? I tried looking into this a few months ago but
         | couldn't find anything.
        
           | coffeeandhn wrote:
           | Yes, in the collector-contrib repository you already had
           | support for traces https://github.com/open-
           | telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-06-18 23:02 UTC)