
DataDog: Don't make the same mistake I did--followup; unhappy customers - williamstein
http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2017/09/datadog-dont-make-same-mistake-i-did.html
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btown
We recently adopted Librato as a monitoring solution, and while the interface
isn't quite as flexible as DataDog, the pricing model is incredible: you pay
only for the metrics and frequency you need.
[https://www.librato.com/pricing](https://www.librato.com/pricing)

For instance, we only need low-frequency sanity CPU/memory checks on hosts
running stable microservices, which we can do for ~$1/host/mo, but for our
heavily-utilized core databases and web servers, we have a lot more, including
full Mongo and Elasticsearch metrics supported out of the box. Total pricing
is transparent and estimated for the month on what seems to be only a 24 hour
lag. Combined with [https://logdna.com/](https://logdna.com/) (YC W15) for no-
nonsense, beautifully presented log aggregation/search/introspection (which
itself is pay-as-you-go per GB ingested), we can pretty easily see what's
going on, with completely elastic and reasonable pricing.

At the end of the day, there are only so many ways to put charts and logs on a
screen. There will be room for value-add services, say, using machine learning
to see warning signs even if not explicitly set up by the tenant. But for
those doing basic monitoring and alerting, I think the space will increasingly
become commoditized the same way IaaS has been... and at that point, people
will insist on transparent pricing that corresponds to some predictable
premium on the _actual_ burden they're placing on their provider. And charging
by host will be only barely correlated with that. But until that time comes,
you can't blame DataDog for being aggressive. It costs money (and,
occasionally, the blood of smaller users) to be winner-takes-all, after all.

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SteveNuts
We're datadog customers and we still get calls and emails from their sales
people asking us what monitoring tools we use and if we're interesting in
switching to datadog.

They must not be using any sort of CRM, or their salespeople might not do any
homework before cold calling.

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web007
One of their sales people tried to social engineer contact with me when I was
running ops at a previous gig. They called out customer support line and said
they were "just disconnected from the ops guy" or something of the sort, and
asked to be transfered.

That's possibly one of the stupidest things I can imagine to sell SaaS to
security-minded people, and they were surprised and offended when I told then
to fuck right off.

Please don't do business with such unethical people.

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lyonlim
This would definitely make me think twice about using DD.

I also just had an unpleasant experience with Salesforce renewals team when
our contract was up for renewal.

