{"slug": "datadog", "name": "Datadog", "category": "observability", "category_name": "Monitoring and analytics", "description": "", "recommenders": 2, "commenters": 10, "warners": 1, "score": 2.815, "rising": -0.65, "first": "2026-01-15", "latest": "2026-10-19", "why": "I would put Datadog as an \"endorse\". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get  loads of value out of it", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 6, "compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I would put Datadog as an \"endorse\". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get  loads of value out of it", "icon": false, "domain": "dtdg.co", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://dtdg.co", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Datadog"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 765123696, "item_id": 47820231, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820231", "by": "chickensong", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive.", "excerpt": "Are you asking about other 3rd party solutions, or thinking of DIY? AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive. Any provider offering AI analysis is just going to add to your cost. > I love putting time into this stuff > like the reason for using Heroku - I have a lot of other stuff I need to focus on You probably need to pick a side here. Building a robust solution with even a fraction of Datadog and Sentry fea", "context": "", "use_case": "observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "Observability Stack \u2013 AI First?"}, {"id": 753494644, "item_id": 47093415, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093415", "by": "Hovertruck", "date": "2026-02-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would put Datadog as an \"endorse\". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get  loads of value out of it", "excerpt": "Much of this matches my own experience. A few thoughts: 1. Cost tracking meetings with your finance team are useful, but for AWS and other services that support it I highly recommend setting billing alarms. The sooner you can know about runaway costs, the sooner you can do something about it. 2. Highly recommend PGAnalyze (https://pganalyze.com/) if you're running Postgres in your stack. It's really intuitive, and ha", "context": "", "use_case": "central observability platform", "switched_from": "", "story": "Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 746096976, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}]}], "who": [{"by": "radud97", "context": "works at a company", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449454", "date": "2026-06-08"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["collecting otel traces", "log storage and debugging", "work observability", "cluster metrics and observability", "metrics", "user activity tracking"], "compared": [{"slug": "grafana", "name": "Grafana", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "clickhouse", "name": "ClickHouse", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "prometheus", "name": "Prometheus", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "opentelemetry", "name": "OpenTelemetry", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-code", "name": "Claude Code", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "loki", "name": "Loki", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "linear", "name": "Linear", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 773746896, "item_id": 48359181, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359181", "by": "dbenamy", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Datadog is a monitoring, tracing, logs system, and more, for your infrastructure and services.", "excerpt": "Datadog | Software Engineers | ONSITE (Boston, Lisbon, Madrid, NYC, Paris, Tel Aviv) | Full-time Datadog is a monitoring, tracing, logs system, and more, for your infrastructure and services. We build our own tsdb, event store [1][2], distributed tracing tools, cutting edge visualizations, and more. We love shipping great experiences for customers just like us and are growing fast! We write a lot of Go, Java, Python,", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 737820208, "item_id": 46113763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113763", "by": "dbenamy", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Datadog is a monitoring, tracing, logs system, and more, for your infrastructure and services.", "excerpt": "Datadog | Software Engineers | ONSITE (Boston, Lisbon, Madrid, NYC, Paris, Tel Aviv) | Full-time Datadog is a monitoring, tracing, logs system, and more, for your infrastructure and services. We build our own tsdb, event store [1][2], distributed tracing tools, cutting edge visualizations, and more. We love shipping great experiences for customers just like us and are growing fast! We write a lot of Go, Java, Python,", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391553", "title": "OTel isn\u2019t going well", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145507", "title": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854875", "title": "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330978", "title": "How to ship a database every day", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047839", "title": "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449280", "title": "Ask HN: How do you handle \"what did user X do yesterday\" from customer support?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 2, "compare": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 802418085, "item_id": 50151130, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151130", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2026-10-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "rely on your existing collector infra (e.g. Datadog (no affiliation), AppInsights, etc.)", "excerpt": "You don't need a proxy to do this. I would argue you should not use a proxy to do this because the end result is a single point of failure direct in the line of your productivity. Both Codex[0] and Claude Code[1] output OTEL traces that you can ingest and process. Other harnesses like OpenCode, Pi, etc. you can hook into their plugin architecture and implement your own OTEL emission from a plugin (or use an off the s", "context": "", "use_case": "collecting OTEL traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"}, {"id": 797679809, "item_id": 49854988, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854988", "by": "superjose", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It connects to datadog (where we store the logs)", "excerpt": "One thing I've been doing is to use it for: 1. Compare the code against production data with MCP. We use a read only platform called Metabase which reads one of the MySQL replicas. I tell the agent to fetch production data and make a static pass (it doesn't run the code) in which it compares shapes and inputs, and oh boy it has caught a few misnomers. 2. To debug production data and create graphs. It connects to data", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage and debugging", "switched_from": "", "story": "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"}, {"id": 790484290, "item_id": 49405268, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405268", "by": "rtpg", "date": "2026-08-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Datadog isn't just a collector, but the whole querying UI as well, right?", "excerpt": "We use victoriametrics, but I believe that's just the collector side of it cuz we also query into it with grafana. Datadog isn't just a collector, but the whole querying UI as well, right?", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 790428837, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "at my day job they went with DD despite the costs", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "", "use_case": "work observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 789351680, "item_id": 49334480, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334480", "by": "tarunnnp", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we use datadog right now", "excerpt": "Yep, all pushed based directly from cluster! It helps that most of the observability ecosystem is converging on this? Even Prometheus, while pull-based inside the cluster, can remote-write to external storage, and that's the shape we'd pick even in that world. (we use datadog right now)", "context": "", "use_case": "cluster metrics and observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "How to ship a database every day"}, {"id": 785838961, "item_id": 49114935, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114935", "by": "coffeebeqn", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "querying a bunch of metrics from datadog", "excerpt": "I use CC to do the testing and verifying in multiple deployment environments. It\u2019s faster at things like coming up a plausible test payload or ten, querying a bunch of metrics from datadog, querying and verifying state from a db before and after testing, scanning all the deployed logs for relevant errors. For me that has been more of an uplift than the coding. I still feel like communication it\u2019s worst at. So writing", "context": "", "use_case": "metrics", "switched_from": "", "story": "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"}, {"id": 775191264, "item_id": 48449454, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449454", "by": "radud97", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "In our company we use datadog + hotjar but indeed, we don\u2019t have the full story.", "excerpt": "That\u2019s a really good question. In our company we use datadog + hotjar but indeed, we don\u2019t have the full story. I\u2019ll check it.", "context": "works at a company", "use_case": "user activity tracking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you handle \"what did user X do yesterday\" from customer support?"}, {"id": 765123696, "item_id": 47820231, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820231", "by": "chickensong", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive.", "excerpt": "Are you asking about other 3rd party solutions, or thinking of DIY? AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive. Any provider offering AI analysis is just going to add to your cost. > I love putting time into this stuff > like the reason for using Heroku - I have a lot of other stuff I need to focus on You probably need to pick a side here. Building a robust solution with even a fraction of Datadog and Sentry fea", "context": "", "use_case": "observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "Observability Stack \u2013 AI First?"}, {"id": 753494644, "item_id": 47093415, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093415", "by": "Hovertruck", "date": "2026-02-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would put Datadog as an \"endorse\". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get  loads of value out of it", "excerpt": "Much of this matches my own experience. A few thoughts: 1. Cost tracking meetings with your finance team are useful, but for AWS and other services that support it I highly recommend setting billing alarms. The sooner you can know about runaway costs, the sooner you can do something about it. 2. Highly recommend PGAnalyze (https://pganalyze.com/) if you're running Postgres in your stack. It's really intuitive, and ha", "context": "", "use_case": "central observability platform", "switched_from": "", "story": "Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years"}, {"id": 746096976, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}]}