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Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a big fan of Datadog from multiple angles.

Their pricing setup is evil. Breaking out by SKUs and having 10+ SKUs is fine, trialing services with “spot” prices before committing to reserved capacity is also fine.

But (for some SKUs, at least) they make it really difficult to be confident that the reserved capacity you’re purchasing will cover your spot use cases. Then, they make you contact a sales rep to lower your reserved capacity.

It all feels designed to get you to pay the “spot” rate for as long as possible, and it’s not a good look.

I understand the pressures on their billing and sales teams that lead to these patterns, but they don’t align with their customers in the long term. I hope they clean up their act, because I agree they’re losing some set of customers over it.

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Another annoying thing is that the billing dashboards do not map clearly to what's on the pricing pages / in the contract. Good luck figuring out the extras for RUM when you have multiple orgs.

Then they have things that I wanted to try for a long time, but... support doesn't care? Repeated "would you like to use this? / very likely, can we try it out? / (silence)". I love their product, but they are so annoying to deal with at the billing level.

> Another annoying thing is that the billing dashboards do not map clearly to what's on the pricing pages / in the contract. Good luck figuring out the extras for RUM when you have multiple orgs.

I, quite literally, was griping to my Datadog CSM about this exact thing last week. They'll email me and be, "Oh, you know you're logging volume this month put you into on-demand indexing rates, right?" and my answer is always, "No, because your monitoring platform makes it nearly impossible for me to monitor it correctly."

You can't reference your contracted volume rates when building monitors out and the units for the metrics you need to watch don't match the units you contract with them on the SKU.

Maddening.

> You can't reference your contracted volume rates when building monitors out and the units for the metrics you need to watch don't match the units you contract with them on the SKU.

Are you referring to the `datadog.estimated_usage.logs.ingested_events` metric? It includes excluded events by default but you can get to your indexed volume by excluding excluded logs. `sum:datadog.estimated_usage.logs.ingested_events{datadog_index:*,datadog_is_excluded:false}.as_count()`

And why do you continue to deal with scum like this? You're ultimately going to pay it and business will carry on as usual for them.

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