[HN Gopher] Datadog acquires Quickwit
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Datadog acquires Quickwit
        
       Author : lrx
       Score  : 275 points
       Date   : 2025-01-09 17:49 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (quickwit.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (quickwit.io)
        
       | bk146 wrote:
       | Curious what Datadog is going to build with this tech. Believe
       | this company pitching themselves as OSS competitor to Datadog a
       | few months ago.
        
         | okbro wrote:
         | Based on the [press
         | release](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-
         | quickwit/) it looks like they're hinting towards offering a
         | 'self-hosted' model for customers that can't use pure SaaS
         | solutions due to regulations:
         | 
         | > Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare,
         | and other regulated industries must meet stringent data
         | residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while
         | maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes
         | challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers'
         | environments or specific regions, hindering teams' ability to
         | attain seamless observability and insight. To help our
         | customers meet these requirements without sacrificing
         | visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are
         | pleased to announce that Quickwit--a popular open source
         | distributed search engine--is joining Datadog.
        
           | everfrustrated wrote:
           | >it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-
           | hosted' model
           | 
           | That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time,
           | which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would
           | be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a
           | natural expansion opportunity.
           | 
           | I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new
           | Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going
           | forward.
        
           | spamizbad wrote:
           | We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless
           | they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape)
           | and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-
           | host for local development so you can even run integration
           | tests against your observability... an edge case need but if
           | you need it you're glad it has it.
        
             | samjewell wrote:
             | I work at Grafana. Can you say more about what specifically
             | you don't recommend?
        
               | Multicomp wrote:
               | Not OP, but looked at doing grafana self hosted for
               | similar reasons. The tooling is too spread out across
               | different installables, the common golden signals and
               | other monitoring metrics have a high learning curve /
               | cliff more like it, and there's not good enough
               | documentation to cover the user from "I want to do a
               | synthetics test on a service to see if it is alive and
               | show the results of that test in a graph"...a journey
               | like that involves 4+ different tools.
        
               | spamizbad wrote:
               | DD was just easier to use for everybody, has lots of
               | useful baked-in things we liked to use (apdex scores),
               | and was intuitive enough that non-devs could design their
               | own dashboards. We also found it way easier to collect
               | metrics, traces, and other things.
               | 
               | FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I
               | suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our
               | business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency
               | and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off
               | our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO.
               | And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was
               | over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the
               | rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet
               | they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where
               | we'll never go back.
        
               | benreesman wrote:
               | I've historically been a pretty big fan of Grafana, I've
               | advocated for the cloud solution at more than one
               | company.
               | 
               | But it seems like business development has utterly
               | hijacked the experience.
               | 
               | The flow you want out of the box is Prometheus, Loki, and
               | Tempo with one button that drops you the config for
               | grafana-agent (now alloy which seems good technically but
               | brings a whole new config language with some truly insane
               | discoverability problems) that makes graphs on screens,
               | you build up from there.
               | 
               | But these days everything is some complicated co-sell,
               | up-sell, click farming hedge maze through 90 kinds of
               | cloud vendor rip-off half baked thing.
               | 
               | Graphs, logs, traces out of the box. Put all the works
               | with Snowflake shit behind an icon. A small one.
        
         | winrid wrote:
         | I could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra
         | with this as a potential cost saving measure.
        
           | andrewstuart2 wrote:
           | And then I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto customers
           | given the current crazy high prices.
        
           | zerd wrote:
           | The architecture of Husky seems fairly similar to quickwit.
           | https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-
           | husky... https://quickwit.io/docs/main-
           | branch/overview/architecture
        
             | akshayshah wrote:
             | It's an ourobouros of influences: the Husky creators left
             | DD to make Warpstream, Warpstream inspired Quickwit, and
             | now Quickwit is joining DD.
        
               | leeoniya wrote:
               | and Confluent acquired WarpStream
        
         | politelemon wrote:
         | A larger bill for enterprise customers.
        
         | everfrustrated wrote:
         | Pretty clear they want it to keep a moat on their side. Can't
         | see Datadog continuing investing in this - it's a pretty direct
         | competitor.
         | 
         | What happened to Vector the last opensource they bought? Are
         | they still hired?
        
           | ripley12 wrote:
           | (disclaimer: Datadog employee)
           | 
           | I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were
           | hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community
           | building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector
           | employees still work here.
        
           | bfung wrote:
           | (Disclaimer: also datadog employee)
           | 
           | I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now
           | currently am the manager for the Community Open Source
           | Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
           | 
           | Just confirming strongly what ripley12 said, as a person with
           | direct involvement in OSS at Datadog.
        
         | slt2021 wrote:
         | arguably they acquired them so they dont build anything further
         | with this tech, as it threatens renewals of their existing
         | enterprise contracts
        
         | hijinks wrote:
         | they are planning to allow you to run your logs in your own
         | datacenter/cloud and put something like a proxy there or being
         | built into quickwit that your logs show up in the datadog UI
         | 
         | My guess is you will be billed per gig or something but not
         | nearly the cost of shipping your logs to DD
        
       | Hixon10 wrote:
       | It's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired.
       | They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations.
       | 
       | 1. https://www.warpstream.com/
       | 
       | 2. https://www.orioledb.com/
       | 
       | 3. https://quickwit.io/
        
         | oliverrice wrote:
         | (disclaimer: supabase employee)
         | 
         | OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally
         | licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an
         | initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage
         | engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug
         | reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it
         | becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase
         | and everywhere else.
         | 
         | Happy to hear any concerns you have
        
           | chrisweekly wrote:
           | Please forgive and help remedy my ignorance: it's a coherent
           | goal to want OrioleDB to be the go-to storage engine for
           | Postgres, on Supabase?
        
             | oliverrice wrote:
             | I don't want to hijack Datadogs+Quickwit's post comment
             | section with unrelated promotional-looking info. Quick
             | summary below but if you have any other questions pls tag
             | olirice in a Supabase GH discussion.
             | 
             | The OrioleDB storage engine for postgres is a drop-in
             | replacement for the default heap method. Its takes
             | advantage of modern hardware (e.g. SSDs) and cloud
             | infrastructure. The most basic benefit is that throughput
             | at scale is > 5x higher than heap [1], but it also is
             | architected for a bunch of other cool stuff [2]. copy-on-
             | write unblocks branching. row-level-WAL enables an S3
             | backend and scale-to-zero compute. The combination of those
             | two makes it a suitable target for multi-master.
             | 
             | So yes, given that it could greatly improve performance on
             | the platform, it is a goal to release in Supabase's primary
             | image once everything is buttoned up. Note that an OrioleDB
             | release doesn't take away any of your existing options. Its
             | implemented as an extension so users would be able to
             | optionally create all heap tables, all orioledb tables, or
             | a mix of both.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.orioledb.com/blog/orioledb-beta7-benchmarks
             | 
             | [2] https://www.orioledb.com/docs
        
               | satvikpendem wrote:
               | Makes sense, perhaps the previous commenter thought
               | OrioleDB was itself a database rather than an
               | implementation detail alternative to current databases.
               | That's what I thought before I went to their site.
        
               | chrisweekly wrote:
               | Yes, exactly. :)
        
               | chrisweekly wrote:
               | Thanks! TIL
        
         | philippemnoel wrote:
         | Acquisitions don't necessarily mean the end of innovation.
         | Sometimes, it allows them to take innovations they've worked
         | hard on for years and expand the reach to a significantly
         | larger audience :)
         | 
         | I have met the founders of all 3 of these companies and can
         | assure you they all care tremendously about bringing their work
         | to the world.
         | 
         | ParadeDB is independent and without plans to sell anytime soon,
         | though :)
        
           | hobs wrote:
           | Not hating on Quickwit, but almost never does an acquisition
           | in the modern era mean continual innovation, most companies
           | are now suborned to a greater purpose, and its almost never
           | going to drive them to build the best thing they already have
           | ended their lifecycle - nobody is going to buy them from DD
           | and their quality/dev process will dominate, and that is of a
           | decent size corporation.
           | 
           | It also looks like most of DD's observability acquisitions
           | are either integrated directly (seemingly with a full
           | rewrite) or look a lot like aquihires for senior folks, so I
           | wouldn't hold my breath here.
        
       | gnabgib wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit_ (228 points, 6
       | months ago, 195 comments)
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701
       | 
       |  _Show HN: Quickwit - OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk,
       | Datadog_ (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments)
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
        
         | slt2021 wrote:
         | * note to myself: build a successful product that threatens
         | large slow moving legacy provider and get quickly acqui-hired
        
           | stevage wrote:
           | Is that not the standard disruption play?
        
       | aseipp wrote:
       | Well, it looks like Quickwit _was_ going to add an Enterprise
       | license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been
       | keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they 're instead
       | going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue
       | on":
       | 
       | > We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and
       | to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon
       | release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to
       | Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.
       | 
       | So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit,
       | but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might
       | otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in
       | my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really
       | looking forward to what else it could bring.
       | 
       | Congrats to the team, in any case!
        
         | mindcrash wrote:
         | "So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed
         | Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of
         | it is might otherwise be winding down?"
         | 
         | They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves,
         | probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar
         | service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want
         | to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license
         | in the hopes that the community picks up the tab.
         | 
         | I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse.
         | 
         | By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the
         | OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability
         | pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock
         | solid product. - https://vector.dev/
        
           | everfrustrated wrote:
           | They bought Vector - it was always opensource
        
           | Dylan1312 wrote:
           | Vector was already OSS when they acquired the company that
           | created it, timber.
           | 
           | https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-
           | techn...
        
             | mindcrash wrote:
             | And yet they did dedicate some resources on it, until now.
             | Which basically is my point :)
        
           | aseipp wrote:
           | Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before
           | Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing
           | maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace,
           | which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable
           | and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.
           | 
           | But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering
           | very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good
           | stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively
           | competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect
           | that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing
           | any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now
           | can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours
           | to it.
           | 
           | To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think
           | it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by
           | someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very
           | good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as
           | well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.
        
       | psanford wrote:
       | Happy that Quickwit is going to Apache 2. Sad that the team won't
       | be working on it anymore.
       | 
       | I loved that I was able to setup Quickwit on AWS lambda and have
       | a good cloud based search engine for $0.01 / month.
        
         | o0-0o wrote:
         | Interesting comment. Any thoughts on what you can use now?
        
           | winrid wrote:
           | The same thing? The community will maintain it
        
       | francoismassot wrote:
       | Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on
       | the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment.
       | 
       | HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very
       | beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is
       | literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts:
       | 
       | - Searching the web for under $1000/month [0]
       | 
       | - A Rust optimization story [1]
       | 
       | - Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2]
       | 
       | - Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512)
       | [3]
       | 
       | - Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4]
       | 
       | - A compressed indexable bitset [5]
       | 
       | - Show HN: Quickwit - OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk,
       | Datadog [6]
       | 
       | - Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7]
       | 
       | - Tantivy - full-text search engine library inspired by Apache
       | Lucene [8]
       | 
       | - Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9]
       | 
       | - Datadog acquires Quickwit [10]
       | 
       | Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We
       | put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to
       | contribute something valuable to our community.
       | 
       | I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by
       | providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and
       | leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This
       | community's authenticity and passion for technology are
       | unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this.
       | 
       | Thank you all :)
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461
       | 
       | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586
       | 
       | [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040
       | 
       | [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421
       | 
       | [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467
       | 
       | [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
       | 
       | [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367
       | 
       | [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834
       | 
       | [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701
       | 
       | [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043
        
         | nextaccountic wrote:
         | I think you forgot to add the links
         | 
         | Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search
         | https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears
         | to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is
         | a great feature of open source)
         | 
         | Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this
         | acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open
         | helps Datadog's bottom line?
        
           | dangoodmanUT wrote:
           | I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of
           | murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and
           | never fixing gross bugs)
        
             | the_duke wrote:
             | Yeah, a Vector dev that is now at Datadog told me that
             | Vector is essentially deprecated.
        
               | bfung wrote:
               | (Disclaimer: datadog employee)
               | 
               | I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now
               | currently am the manager for the Community Open Source
               | Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
               | 
               | It's def. not deprecated, but it did take awhile to sort
               | out. It's not easy figuring out business vs giving away
               | software for free.
               | 
               | Anyways, there's quite a few issues and GitHub
               | discussions everyday, in addition to Discord chats.
        
               | quicksilver03 wrote:
               | I'm using Vector for my own infrastructure and at work,
               | at the time it seemed the best option to ship logs to
               | various destinations. Are there any alternatives?
        
           | philippemnoel wrote:
           | pg_search dev here -- Thanks for mentioning us.
           | 
           | Re: Tantivy. I'm hopeful the community Paul and the Quickwit
           | team have built on top of Tantivy will continue to flourish.
           | I'm sure Datadog will build product(s) with Quickwit, which
           | is built on Tantivy and will contribute to it. Many other
           | companies like ours (ParadeDB) and other databases also
           | integrate it. I can't speak for others, but we'll contribute
           | whenever possible. We're currently working on supporting
           | nested documents in Tantivy, for example, and hoping to
           | upstream this work.
           | 
           | While it's reasonable to be concerned, I'd say this is a win
           | for Quickwit, Tantivy and, of course, the well-deserving team
           | behind them.
        
         | adeptima wrote:
         | Congratulations! The fact you and your team managed to built
         | Tantivy is a huge contribution to open source.
         | 
         | As someone who never managed to built a fond relationship with
         | Apache Lucene based products (Solf, Elastic). I was extremely
         | happy to see Tantivy in open source.
         | 
         | BM25 scoring, proper asian language support, speed, memory foot
         | prints, etc - amazing job! Thank you so much!
         | 
         | https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy
         | 
         | IMHO Datadog made a smart move!
         | 
         | If Tantivy itself just stays permanently under Apache2 licence
         | and find a sustainable path to co exist with the rest of open
         | source community - it's all good guys. You are more than
         | deserve a commercial success.
        
         | blinded wrote:
         | Congrats!!
        
       | jhgg wrote:
       | Hoping this leads to datadog launching a logging solution that
       | does not cost an arm and a leg at scale.
        
         | iandanforth wrote:
         | Honestly this is my _only_ criticism of datadog. The product is
         | great but good lord that pricing.
        
         | bdcravens wrote:
         | Based on my experience with them, this isn't a technical or
         | product issue, but a cultural one. (DD is very sales-driven, in
         | a bad way)
        
       | maxwellg wrote:
       | > Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of
       | customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing
       | infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user
       | experience.
       | 
       | I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by
       | a competitor after that.
        
         | PittleyDunkin wrote:
         | It's a risk you deal with giving back to open source.
         | 
         | The good part for the rest of us is it's a signal that there's
         | likely some appetite for a fork if Datadog screws the pooch.
        
         | sealeck wrote:
         | Either they did it on their own, in which case that's open
         | source for you, or they have some kind of contract with
         | quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't
         | have some clauses which handle this.
        
       | liminal wrote:
       | We just moved from Elastic to Quickwit. Sigh. What other open
       | source, object storage backed logging databases do people
       | recommend?
        
         | tdubey wrote:
         | Loki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/).
         | There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing
         | pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we
         | had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe
         | its much more mature now.
        
           | ed_mercer wrote:
           | Just don't look at the list of open issues and the lack of
           | responses.
        
           | mcpeepants wrote:
           | Loki is significantly different in several ways, including
           | the lack of full-text indexing.
        
         | makeavish wrote:
         | I suggest giving SigNoz a try. Built on top of Clickhouse, it's
         | fast and scalable
         | 
         | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz
         | 
         | PS: I am maintainer at SigNoz
        
           | tonyhart7 wrote:
           | what another open source you can recommend ?
        
       | scop wrote:
       | I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company
       | for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018
       | completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on
       | the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when
       | lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda
       | early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a
       | rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped
       | in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who
       | made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk
       | and happy and think Datadog is cool.
       | 
       | Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim
       | to deserve a second look?
        
         | orf wrote:
         | What does any of that have to do with the actual product?
        
           | scop wrote:
           | It made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions
           | I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my
           | rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight
           | with me in answering my question?
        
           | film42 wrote:
           | The product itself is very good, but the sales process is
           | truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to
           | answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to
           | my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?"
           | They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with
           | $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of
           | extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just
           | bad, it's comically bad.
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | That is their product. You want to cancel? Send the army of
           | clowns.
        
           | baobun wrote:
           | Different person with similar stance: Those specific
           | examples? Whatever.
           | 
           | We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the
           | DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not
           | good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs
           | was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract
           | changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.
           | 
           | The product itself is great but from my perspective it's
           | absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side
           | of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and
           | stress associated.
           | 
           | If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for
           | alternatives.
        
             | compootr wrote:
             | qw is open source so you can continue to use the foss-
             | licensed software as it is
        
           | chronotis wrote:
           | For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and
           | account relationship process is just as important of a factor
           | now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the
           | infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one
           | that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.
           | 
           | Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a
           | voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active
           | customer.
           | 
           | Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough
           | friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes
           | to replatform our workload just to not have to have those
           | unending inbound calls.
           | 
           | NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice
           | for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing
           | options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll
           | be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it
           | to.
           | 
           | tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product
        
         | adeptima wrote:
         | There are multiple possible outcomes from the merge with
         | Datadog.
         | 
         | As my ex manager once told - there is no such thing as nice
         | people in P&L statement. Someone has to pay
         | 
         | It's very easy to be anxious and see the path to the dark side
         | here.
         | 
         | However one of possible outcomes - there will be a valid open
         | source competitor to Grafana ecosystems, and this along secure
         | the rest of scene from relicensing. There is a chance it will
         | be all win-win with clear sustainable path and no money and
         | power struggles for founders.
         | 
         | I want to stay on the positive here. Time will show.
        
           | paulryanrogers wrote:
           | Is Grafana and its ecosystem no longer open source? I haven't
           | used it in a while
        
             | adeptima wrote:
             | No, no. It's all good and amazing. IMHO Grafana is getting
             | even more important in the light of possible disappearing a
             | solid potential competitor. Hope Datadog will be smart
             | enough with Quickwit and opportunity to win the hearts and
             | minds.
             | 
             | Clearly an opportunity for Datadog to make a big statement
             | here, and change its perceptions.
        
         | datavirtue wrote:
         | The name is perfect, Data DOG.
        
         | Justin_K wrote:
         | I have had the opposite experience. Sales has been really
         | respectful of our time.
        
         | rr808 wrote:
         | > Get us all drunk and happy
         | 
         | Damn I never get sales pitches like that.
        
         | thebruce87m wrote:
         | Agreed. Once they had a whiff of our domain every engineer was
         | being bombarded with emails like "Re: meeting next week".
        
       | dirtshell wrote:
       | Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD
       | and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement
       | some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for
       | alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an
       | engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more
       | annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and
       | grepping.
        
         | geraldwhen wrote:
         | Large json logs just won't appear for hours, which makes it so
         | fun to debug issues in deployed environments!
         | 
         | Showing ALL the logs isn't cool. Showing SOME logs at random is
         | cool.
        
         | SteveNuts wrote:
         | My biggest issue with them is the absolutely, hilariously,
         | ridiculously expensive custom metrics.
        
         | everfrustrated wrote:
         | Easily the best product in its category. The value is in
         | APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a
         | lot.
         | 
         | If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly
         | priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-
         | funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using
         | Splunk you can afford it.
         | 
         | One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by
         | seats so easy to open up for all of eng including product/QA
         | teams and not just devs to use which is great for breaking down
         | barriers.
         | 
         | It's a bit like aws in that it's a platform - use of one
         | product tends to encourage using more from their suite.
        
           | xtracto wrote:
           | Second this.
           | 
           | I used to log large apps using kibana and elastic search.
           | Also using the clusterfuck that are all AWS tries at this
           | (cloud watch, log insights.amd whatnot).
           | 
           | Nothing compares to what DD give you in observability.
           | 
           | Having said that, DD should only be an AWS feature. They
           | should buy them for a couple of billions and integrate it as
           | a service for all of AWS infrastructure.
        
             | leeoniya wrote:
             | > They should buy them for a couple of billions
             | 
             | DD has a market cap of $48B
        
           | hobs wrote:
           | Which just meant that when the business had sticker shock
           | they just disabled all the useful features of DD which
           | consumed so much.
        
         | datavirtue wrote:
         | It's just a solution to garbage distributed cloud service logs
         | and devs that don't know how to log an application.
        
         | hackernoops wrote:
         | DD is the Oracle/SAP of o11y. Scumbags that kill innovation.
        
         | jitl wrote:
         | It's good, I like it. I don't use the logs product (we splunk)
         | but I'm big fan of the automatic profiling and trace/span
         | stuff. It's like 50% better UX compared to other tools I've
         | tried. But it's expensive enough we're always thinking about
         | moving off it. That will be a very sad day for me.
        
       | acaloiar wrote:
       | The clock begins counting down to Datadog figuring out how to
       | charge per node, cpu, container, RAM (KB), and unicode characters
       | indexed.
        
         | Too wrote:
         | Isn't this what they already do? Log pricing is per ingested GB
         | and monitoring is charged per node.
        
           | Hilift wrote:
           | They have to though, right? If you look at the nonsense
           | people generate in logs, it would be a war crime to not
           | monetize that. 20% of the PB's of data is probably the same
           | 2,100 UTF-16 characters of Windows event id 4624.
        
         | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
         | They already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per
         | host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby
         | projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing
         | model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all
         | these nice features are really worth that high prices.
        
       | propter_hoc wrote:
       | > This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger
       | open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs
       | became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter
       | for the company and raise a series A round.
       | 
       | Rhetorically, why was it time for this?
       | 
       | Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a
       | mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up
       | round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the
       | market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an
       | exit.
        
         | bomewish wrote:
         | Practically, what happens if the founders don't want to play
         | ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just
         | not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs
         | coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | It's going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In
           | my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an
           | alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which
           | you likely won't have a majority on) will reject it. VC's
           | don't care about recouping money, they'd rather you fired
           | everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the
           | money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens.
           | It's not about money it's about reputation.
           | 
           | If you suggest something they don't like, they'll stall until
           | you run out of money, or force you out.
        
         | Rastonbury wrote:
         | You're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting
         | PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?
        
           | propter_hoc wrote:
           | Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?
           | 
           | Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't
           | give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised
           | from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a
           | high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited
           | respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital
           | constrained without raising additional rounds.
           | 
           | So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events."
           | But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my
           | previous experience.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | > why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right
         | there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company
         | with great tech.
         | 
         | Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the
         | seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If
         | you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is
         | not the path to that.
        
           | satvikpendem wrote:
           | Depends, if you have a majority on the board you can do
           | whatever you want. Some companies get a seed round to then
           | use that to bootstrap to profitability and growth over time.
        
       | hackernoops wrote:
       | I integrated Quickwit into our o11y platform. It was great tech
       | with lots of promise, and now it's dead. Yet another reason to
       | never do business with Datahog.
        
       | morelish wrote:
       | How much did they get acquired for?
        
       | seaghost wrote:
       | Sqreen was a great product for startups. Unfortunately acquired
       | by the Datadog. Product was never fully integrated into their
       | offerings and there is no such alternative.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | Come on this is HN, the news / link aggregator of a VC: tell us
       | how much the exit was in $$$ ;-)
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-01-11 23:01 UTC)