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Comment by antoineMoPa | Hacker News Reader

Is this the same Datadog that sends spam calls to developers after office hours to sell their tools?

Yup. I find their sales strategy deplorable as not only do they cold call like crazy, but their presence at conferences are all sales and no meat.

For example early on in AWS Lambda’s life, DataDog was hosting a session at reInvent that looked like a semi-advanced dive into the new technology. Awesome! I was legitimately excited and thought this might be one of the better sessions of the conference. I show up only to find it is 30 minutes of stand up comedy, 10 minutes of the most basic “how to create a lambda function” tutorial (probably ripped right from Jeff Barr’s blog), and 15 minutes of “you should buy DataDog”.

To this day, we use “DataDog” as in team meetings as a term to communicate shadiness etc.

(Edited to fix typo on Barr’s name)

Their billing practices aren’t great either. Non transparent pricing, requiring docusign after signup to change plans, and no refunds for unused services.

Their billing doesn't match up with AWS's (AWS is by the second, Datadog by the hour, or at least when we used it) even though it's by the cloud instance (doesn't roll over). So we ended up paying more for the monitoring than the actual resources being monitored. When we asked for a break, they agreed to give us a 50% break IF we signed up for additional services.

Not to mention that, by default, they bill by the whole calendar month for each infrastructure and APM host. Scale your Kubernetes cluster up and then back down? That'll be an extra $18 + $36 per additional node (not $15 + $31 – that's the contract pricing, not the on-demand pricing), even if they were only online for a few days – even if they were only online for thirty seconds. Swap out a node? By default they bill by unique instances, not by number of instances, so they'll bill you for that, too.

If you ask them about it, they'll “happily” put you onto hourly on-demand billing (which seems to fix the unique vs. count thing, too), which is more expensive if you let something run on-demand for a whole month... but isn't the point of an on-demand service that you're not running it for a whole billing period?

Also, their agent logs fairly noisily, and of course its logs count toward your quota! I upgraded a cluster without also upgrading the agent, and didn't notice for about a week that each agent was happily spamming away about some long-deprecated Kubernetes API no longer being available[0]. At $2.55/million log lines and fewer than a million lines logged, this was not a costly mistake, but it's the principle of the thing. Why should an incompatibility in their agent (which their dashboard could specifically alert about, but doesn't!) cost me money?

[0] https://github.com/DataDog/helm-charts/issues/620#issuecomme...

Yes, their sales team is far too aggressive, I can't imagine it's successful for building their brand with developers

I too have had more spam calls from Datadog than any other tech company. Their product seems great but after what feels like harassment, I’ve never wanted to give them my money.

As someone allergic to those stupid cold calls, this is real disappointing to hear—I hadn't been exposed, presumably because I'm already a customer and have been for years.

As much as I love the product, I'll have to reconsider my usage of Datadog in future projects.

I'll never use Datadog for this reason. I have been pestered by so many salesmen _relentlessly_, even after saying I was not interested.

How does one go about removing a phone number off of these sales data aggregators?

I don't think I've ever explicitly given these phone numbers to tools like this (e.g. signing up to Datadog with a phone number), so this seems like sensitive PII that must have been leaked and scraped in some shady source that these sales "data-enrichment" tools happily take.

Change your number and only leak to IRL contacts.

Optionally have your work provide you a work phone and only give that out for work activities.

There are probably way too many data aggregators out there to keep track of completely, but theres definitely a few github repos I've seen that keep lists of both the companies and their opt-out procedures (some with automation).

This is one of the better ones I've seen: https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-Li...

From a purely B2B perspective, the most egregious offender IMHO is Zoominfo largely because of the wide adoption in sales orgs. You can opt-out here: https://www.zoominfo.com/privacy-center/update/remove

Also the same Datadog that in order to give us a price break due to a misconfiguration, strong-armed us into signing up for additional monitoring.

What kind of monitoring did they strong-arm you into? How did they strong arm? Genuine questions!

It's been long enough that I'd have to dig up the emails. May have been RUM, uncertain. Bottom line is we have never been treated that way by any other company. No matter how many podcasts they put ads on or events they sponsor at conferences, they are the tech equivalent of used cars salesmen; they are not friends of developers.

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