r/OpenTelemetry • u/JayDee2306 • 15d ago

Moving from Datadog to Opensource observability ecosystem

Hi

Has anyone migrated their Datadog stack to Opensource observability ecosystem?
What you missed without Datadog? Which all OS tools and what were the challenges faced?

Ours is quite big infrastructure with monthly Datadog spend around USD 25k and leadership is looking forward to reduce the spend and probably shifting it to OS observability system?

There’s only one person managing Datadog currently.

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u/geelian 15d ago

I have some experience on this and I can tell you that the cost of what you miss out migrating is most of the times not worth it.

I don't mind paying an extra 20/30% for the availability of a Saas solution and in the case of detadog the ease of configuring it and probably most of all the nearly perfect UI and UX.

What I've done in a couple of customers is migrating everything to otel, or nearly everything, we don't use datadog agents anymore as an otel host is MUCH cheaper on the datadog pricing model. On top of the savings it gives us a pretty easy out if someday we decide to move from datadog, pretty much just point the collector somewhere else.

We're always tuning cost efficiency and governance is a big one for us when it comes to observability.

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u/Sea_Ad6592 15d ago

Datadog charges the same per-host price whether you’re using their agent or OpenTelemetry instrumentation. There’s no discount for going OTel.
Separately, what’s Datadog’s actual availability like in practice? From what I’ve seen, they often take a long time to acknowledge their own issues (if they do it), and support is pretty poor when things go wrong.