If you are in decision making position, I struggle to see why would you want to spend so much energy installing Prometheus + Grafana stack instead of just using DataDog.
Even worse if your company attempts to build Prometheus/Grafana from scratch. Just why? What a huge waste of money.
If it contributes to your core business then ok, I can see why you may want to build custom solutions.
Interesting you should bring this up as we are currently in the process of moving from Datadog to Prometheus/Grafana. What we've found is all the time you save in not setting up Prometheus we lose in support tickets to Datadog to get them to explain undocumented functionality and hidden "magic" they put in place. With Prometheus/Grafana the answers are always out there because of the sheer number of people out there. We've even resorted to sending known metrics on known intervals just to understand what Datadog does differently for monitors vs graphs. Also the majority of the time for a monitoring system is not spent on setting it up but rather on generating the dashboards and alerts.
Also with all buys systems there is a hidden costs in managing the legion of user accounts to access these new services. It's rarely as easy as just setting up SAML or single sign on.
The final thing that people never talk about is cost. Yes there is the cost of an engineer to set it up but often that costs is cheaper than the bought service. This is especially true of pay per api call type services.
On premise Prometheus/Grafana could be lower than 5% TCO compared to DataDog, at least at places I have worked, and I am including employee time. This isn't particulary a discussion about cap ex. vs. op ex. either.
> so much energy installing Prometheus + Grafana stack instead of just using DataDog.
Because it could be done in few commands the second time. And learning is only possible when wasting time on this kind of things, rather than trying hard to custom fit your usecase using some buyable tool.
That being said, I kind of partially agree with you and the author though. Don't maintain service just to feel that you are in control, but with the exception that if you are doing it for the learning purpose.
i think there is a huge difference between using prometheus and paying for datadog. the article argues for not building prometheus which makes sense in 99.95% of cases.
btw, the build vs buy should be a topic of discussion whenever people want to build something. at an absolute minimum they need to understand (and use) what’s already out there before they embark on the journey of building themselves
If you are in decision making position, I struggle to see why would you want to spend so much energy installing Prometheus + Grafana stack instead of just using DataDog.
Even worse if your company attempts to build Prometheus/Grafana from scratch. Just why? What a huge waste of money.
If it contributes to your core business then ok, I can see why you may want to build custom solutions.