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.<p>Hopefully the PRs get upstreamed quickly without any opposition from Datadog unlike last time.<p>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.
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.<p>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...<p>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)<p>but DataDog is a $40b company for a reason I guess?<p>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.
All of these threads turn into how expensive Datadog is and discussions about open source alternatives.<p>My 2c - observability is the easiest thing to rent. There are zero reasons to build it out and have a team maintain it. I cannot imagine a management chain wanting to invest in a greenfield unpredictable and guaranteed unreliable 0lly service. Datadog's great super stickiness comes from their polish, their availability, and turn key instrumentation that is hard to build from scratch.<p>For any open source alternative to compete, they need to be at least similarly turnkey.<p>The only real threat to Datadog are other closed-source competitors who are<p>1. Willing to invest to be as reliable and turnkey<p>2. Willing to accept a lower price. Literally price it $1/host less than Datadog and a lot of companies will start the migration.