Yeah there are many me-too businesses in this space - just like any other, and they are probably doomed. I feel the author is being too harsh here.
They aren't an AI monitoring company. Pagerduty is a rules engine based alerting system. Datadog is nagios 2.0 on the web, with really aggressive sales people, and really expensive.
None of them are "feed me your raw data and I'll make sane alerts and root cause analysis"
Which is the core argument of the post, if you can't do alert routing, or root cause pinpointing then AI isn't going to help you. Its like saying that AI is going to make your UX, or backend app.
erm that's AI too.
Manual rule writing and AI are not mutually exclusive.
Oh man. At a previous job, I talked with some datadog people at a conference. Told them that while their product looked interesting, it wasn't really a good fit for our usecase. Few weeks later a sales person called me "Hi this is XXX from Datadog, remember we talked at conference YYY" (no, I don't remember you personally, and I'm absolutely certain you don't remember me either, but alas). I told him the same thing, that no, I'm sure it's a good product but doesn't fit our usecase. Ok, thx, bye. Well, next week he calls me again. No, I still haven't re-evaluated datadog, and I still think it's not a fit for our usecase. The following week he emails me, asking whether I'd like a more in-depth look at their product, or if there's somebody else at my employer who could be interested. Since it seems like a rehash of our previous discussions, I don't bother replying. Week after that, he emails me again, with some passive aggressive "still waiting for a reply here". Finally, some days later he emails me a long whine accusing me of breaking the trust between us by not responding to his emails. Seriously? FU.
Maybe Datadog needs some AI in their sales pipeline to figure out when they are pissing of potential customers to the point they vow to never have anything to do with the company.