Yet another observability post: Datadog Alternative: When to Move Out? .

This article describes a fairly simple experiment: what would it cost to run Datadog compared to Prometheus & Thanos on different scales.

Although, the scope of the experiment was somewhat limited (no logs, no APM), it provides some numbers that you can use while evaluating different observability solutions.

The bottom line is: with the growth of your technological footprint, Datadog price grows faster compared to the Prometheus stack. Which is true for any SaaS solution compared to self-hosted, I believe.

However, another important considerations is that free software is not "free". You cannot just replace a vendor with an open-source tool and call it a day. You require engineering time to support and maintain those platforms. Therefore, on a smaller scale it might much more effective to use SaaS (especially, if you don't have experts in a given domain in your company yet).

#observability