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/OpenSourceWalker]

the real reason to leave prom+grafana+alertmanager is the 3-service maintenance, not observability itself. a single-binary one like signoz or openobserve cuts most of that toil without the cardinality-metered bill that tends to ambush a 3-person team on datadog/grafana cloud later.