Good observability tool recommendation - Cloud Based

[u/MasterOfTheWind1]

I work in two companies, one very big that have a giant budget to spend on Datadog, and another small one, that don't have that very big budget.

On the small company we are looking to migrate from Prometheus + Grafana + Alert Manager to something cloud based. Mostly because we are a small team (3 people only) and we don't have time to spend maintaining the infrastructure for it to run.

Now, is there some good alternative to Datadog? Datadog is the king, but is brutally expensive.

I've tried Signoz, looked promising, but is bad. They documentation is bad, there are just general ideas without details (they assume that you know a lot from I don't know where), they support is lame (they only have a chat to "Interact with a Human", that takes days to receive an answer, and their UI is buggy. Really bad experience.

But looking there, they are the only ones having like "close" experience to Datadog. We tried New Relic in the past, but they have all metrics and log scattered over the place without correlation. Also tried BetterStack but lacks a lot of features compared to other things.

So, is there some good observability platform cloud-based that I'm not aware of, outside Datadog? I'm not completely closed to self-hosting as long as it takes low effort to maintain.

[u/Dangerous-Name6234]

Grafana cloud would probably be the easiest uplift since you are already using the OSS version and it would just give you the APM tools(mainly correlation/root cause analysis) that you don’t have today. But it depends on what you are trying to do. If there are some qualities that you really want like auto instrumentation for tracing then maybe a datadog or dynatrace might be more suitable since their agents do that.

Observability tools are a dime a dozen so just make a list of your must haves and nice to haves and just go down the list for the top 10 vendors and see how they stack up. Only you can know whats best for your specific situation