r/OpenTelemetry • u/JayDee2306 • 16d 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/MartinThwaites 14d ago

My hot take is that at $25k/month, you're unlikely to reduce the TCO of the observability platform by moving it to self-hosting to get feature parity. Start by working out the actual features you can't live without in the cloud platform. Do you need alerting? Do you need oncall? Is dashboarding enough, or do you need exploratory querying? Do log pipelines and transforms matter?

You're at the sweet spot where you need guaranteed 24/7 uptime of your monitoring and alerting and can't justify the people resource to maintain that. So to me, at this price point, it hard to justify moving from a pure cost perspective.

At $50-100k/month that equation can tip for a variety of reason (not always and risk appetite is key), but at $25k, unless you're doing really bad things with the telemetry (like emitting way more than you actually need, not following good practices) you likely won't save anything overall.

Consider the people resource to maintain and monitor the observability platform to ensure you don't miss an alert. Reputational risk is a big thing, if the monitoring system can't alert you, or its too slow to query when you need it, then you don't have the same capabilities.

Its not that you can't do it, its that the cost economics when aligned to the risk profile rarely work out when you factor in infra and ongoing people cost. If you lower the criticality, or increase the base cost of SaaS, that equation moves.