alt Hacker NewsMy experience mirrors yours wrt Datadog. It's incredible value at low scale, you get a full robust system with great devex for pennies. Once you hit that tipping point though, you are locked in pretty hardcore. Datadog snakes its way far into your codebase, with all the custom tracing and stuff like that. Migrating off of it is a very expensive endeavor, which is probably one of the reasons why they are such a money printing operation.
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Yeah, the secret sauce of the dd libs was/is addictive for sure! I think its perhaps better now you can just use oTel for custom traces and oTel contrib libs for auto instrumentation and send that to the dd agent? I have not yet tried it because i suspected labels and other things might be named differently than the DD auto instrumentation/contrib packages, but i don't think the gap is as big now?
I think "medium scale" is probably more appropriate. For a $3M~$5M revenue SaaS you're still paying $50k+/year. That's not nothing for a small owner or PE backed SaaS company that is focused on profits/EBITDA.