
Datadog releases Incident Management, Profiler, Error Tracking, and more - dbenamy
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/dash-2020-new-feature-roundup/
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bdcravens
I feel like Datadog has a great product. I only wish I hadn't had such
negative experiences with their sales team.

~~~
Lazare
Yes.... We originally switched to Datadog because we were looking for New
Relic alternative, ran across them, signed up for a trial, liked it, the end.

But then like....18 months later we got contacted by our brand new "account
manager", who pestered us into a conference call (a bad start!), and then
exhibited a simply amazing lack of knowledge of us, our history with Datadog,
our current plan and usage, how we're using Datadog, what features we are
already using, what features we might find useful, what features Datadog is
planning on adding, what features Datadog already has, or indeed, literally
anything else about the company they allegedly worked for or the product they
were apparently trying to sell.

I was literally telling this sales person "hey, I see you have this feature;
it costs a bit more money, but it might solve a problem we have, can you
explain to us why we should give your company more money for this feature",
and we got so sidetracked trying to explain to the sales person how their own
product worked that we never actually got an answer. And that was that; never
heard from them again.

I really like Datadog, but it was easily the most frustrating and confusing
experience I've ever had talking to a sales person. "Hey, you guys just posted
a news article saying Datadog now solves problem X, we have problem X, can you
explain how we can give you money in exchange for solving problem X?"
Apparently not!

Still love the product, but man, my interactions with them have not been
great. (Other than the one disasterous meeting with our account manager, we
also have had mixed luck talking to support. They solved the problem
eventually, but both times it ended up taking way, WAY more back and forth to
get to the bottom of it than I would have expected.)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
If you‘d like to avoid that, have a look at Instana. None of that outrageous
pricing, and the focus is actually more about helping you find issues instead
of Graph Porn.

Note that I used to work there, so I’m biased.

~~~
ksec
>instead of _Graph Porn_

Thank You. These two words alone describe something I couldn't quite figure
out what was wrong with these products. Far too much focus on Graphs.

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mdaniel
I rage closed that window for downloading a 720p(!) 2.5MB video showing some
swooshing squares that takes up the entirety of the "welcome to this content"
section. It's one level of disrespect for my time to eat a huge swath of space
with a gif, it's a whole other level to put a movie trailer above your blog
content just to make squares dance around

In an attempt to rescue this rant with some actual content: one might have
interest in the recent series of threads over in r/devops about people's
differing experiences between datadog's _product_ and datadog's
_organization_. I would guess if there are problems knowing ahead of time how
much mere monitoring costs, that "attack surface" grows the more products one
attempts to consume from datadog

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shoulderfake
you are angry about 2.5mb video, its 2020 pal get a broadband connection

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calabin
I just moved to Phoenix from Chicago - even in a major US city I'm forced to
use DSL by the apartment complex I live in. I didn't think I'd have to check
to see if I can get broadband because it seemed insane to think that it
wouldn't be available.

Nonetheless, pages with needless weight have become incredibly annoying,
inconvenient, and cumbersome. Also, the much of the rest of the US (outside of
metro areas) has some really terrible access to decent internet speeds. That's
not even to mention anywhere in the rest of the world.

So kindly cool it with your needless condescension. It's unnecessary and
contributes nothing.

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mech422
Hey Neighbor!

    
    
      If you can get it... Cox has gigablast available here for about $120/month.  I get about 800ish down and 35ish up.

~~~
calabin
Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately, the apartment complex has an exclusivity
agreement with CenturyLink. Cox and others have expressed willingness to pull
cable into my unit, but the management company just won't allow it. It's
driving me insane. It's unfortunate that this type of practice is even
allowed/legal.

~~~
mech422
oh wow...That really does suck. I haven't tried any of the WISPs[0]yet, but
maybe they would work?

0 like [https://www.airfiber.cc/](https://www.airfiber.cc/) ??

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kevsim
We used DataDog extensively for metrics at my last job. It was awesome, but
terribly expensive. Then people wanted to get logs in the same service, so we
started rolling that out and it got even more expensive (multiple times
competitors like SumoLogic).

Would assume these new features will also come with a hefty pricetag (though
for APM it's not like competitors like NewRelic are inexpensive).

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gregwebs
I think they have the least expensive logging product available. But you have
to

1) Not run the DataDog agent (you can use fluent-bit) 2) Filter logs so they
are not indexed (and in some cases not ingested)

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manigandham
Try LogDNA - it's been the cheapest, fastest and more reliable logging service
I've used.

[https://logdna.com/](https://logdna.com/)

~~~
gregwebs
Their pricing is greater than Datadog's, particularly if you can filter out
any logs before indexing them.

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sergiotapia
Datadog pricing is ridiculously complex. Prepare to not really know how much
you're paying and how much you owe and why. It's the AWS of metrics.

If you need an APM I recommend appsignal. Predictable pricing, and easy to
use/find the right info you need.

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jeffbee
Profiler looks pretty dope. Does anyone know why neither DataDog nor Google
Cloud Profiler support C++? Technically Google supports anything if you
implement the agent yourself, but none of these tools ship a C++ profiler out
of the box.

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mmclean
Regarding Google Cloud Profiler (I'm the PM), this is for a few reasons:

\- We have good support for Go, Java, JS, and Python, but are still adding a
few features for these languages (MUSL support for Alpine just shipped, still
need to add heap profiling for Python)

\- C++ isn't as heavily used by our ops tools customers as Go, Java, JS, and
Python

\- We have several new analysis features in the pipe, and the cost supporting
an additional language would slow down the delivery of these

There's no lack of desire to add new languages, but we chose to prioritize
completing existing language support and new analytics functionality this
year. I'm guessing that the other teams making products in this space face
similar constraints and made similar tradeoffs.

~~~
jeffbee
Thanks for your perspective. When I was at dropbox I wrote a quick tool that
would convert perf data files to cloud profiler protobufs and upload them to
google. I really appreciate that the API exists allowing people to use
whatever language they want. I'm not a huge fan of the datadog model where you
need their agent and they don't have a documented API.

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rememberlenny
These tools are major. The last company I was at extensively planned error
budgets and SLAs, but the tooling was very squishy. Seeing the incident board
and tooling around monitoring feels like they hit the nail on the head.

I don't know much about Datadog, but it seems like they are building exactly
what their customers need.

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allyant
Recently implemented datadog at a large financial organisation - it does well
at focusing on its core features. We had to create a lot of glue to make it
enterprise ready - Active directory sync due to it not supporting groups,
permission model is poor. If you wanted anything done raise a support ticket
rather than with your sales contact too.

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psionn
I work on authentication and access control at Datadog - we've recently
improved the group mapping through SAML and we have a number of features in
the permission model that we're excited about. Eager to show it off if you're
interested.

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staysaasy
I continue to be really impressed by Datadog. They're in the very exciting
post-IPO enterprise SaaS phase where they still have startup mojo + the
resources of a large company + the need to continually grow and expand.

I feel for the teams that will need to compete against them as they enter new
markets, although I expect that their forays will fail at a fairly high rate
(as most product line expansions do).

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BozeWolf
Was reading the whole thread, but got distracted by “post-IPO enterprise SaaS
phase”. You won buzzword/corporate bingo ;-)

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staysaasy
Heh, yeah. If you have a less buzzwordy way to phrase that I'd be curious to
hear it ;-), I think that the description is accurate although upon reflection
I'm with you that it feels pulled out of corporate hell.

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mazatta
The only Datadog feature announcement I look forward to is "we've solved our
stability issues!".

I am sick of playing the "is our infrastructure or Datadog's on fire?" game at
3 AM whenever I'm on call. I can only imagine the firefighting their
engineering teams are dealing with, but for what you pay, I expect better.

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socialist_coder
Be prepared to pay an arm and leg once you start putting custom metrics into
your app.

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rob-olmos
If I'm understanding correctly, currently "RUM Errors" is not "Error
Tracking", and "RUM Errors" only records an error if that RUM session is
actually profiled/recorded?

Ie., you have a RUM sample rate less than 100%, so some errors aren't recorded
in RUM Errors? Will that be the same situation for "Error Tracking"?

Curious to see what this pricing is.. eg., any client-side errors get auto-
included as a RUM session? There's a good amount of bogus browser errors due
to incomplete or oddly sandboxed javascript environments.

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pain_perdu
How does their Incident Management differ to that of Blameless.com which I
believe is the current market leader.

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abledon
so is the "error tracking" feature equivalent to Sentry?

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kevsim
Yep, seems very much the same type of thing.

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scaryclam
Except more expensive...

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cloudpundit
Didn't they say it was included for free?

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scaryclam
Not that I can see. The article doesn't say it's free or at no additional cost
that I can find, so I'll not assume it's either.

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stewart87
Anyone using their APM? why/ why not?

~~~
palijer
Using it on all of our services, we all love it. Troubleshooting and
optimizations are ridiculously simply, there isn't much investigation, APM
just tells you what is wrong, saves a lot of Dev time and we'll worth the
money IMO

~~~
aeyes
What language? I tried Python Django a year ago and didn't get half the detail
NewRelic shows out of the box. Given the much higher price I didn't even
bother looking into custom instrumentalization.

But a year has passed, maybe I should give it another try since NewRelic is
trying to make everything as hard as possible with their new UI.

