Elastic is my choice. Don’t like grafana and dd felt like it was holding your hand while telling you to give them your money as they punch you repeatedly.

I want improvements like “dropdown menu of tags not limited to 50 items” and “one button forecast on any graph”. Unsure if any SQL query language will solve my annoyance that stuff in Datadog was one click, and in Grafana is 14 clicks or impossible without referencing a Book of the Arcane.

Heck I’m dying for “I can copy a graph between dashboards”. Grafana allows this but if any variable is in the graph but doesn’t exist in the destination, pasting just creates an empty graph.

I use New Relic and I'm not sure I would recommend it. Sure it was easy to install on all the server but now I keep getting alerts every months (on like the 2nd day) that I ran out of some "quota" of 100GB. I thought that's impossible as I almost don't use it but apparently they (used to) send by default list of running processes every second and that gunks things up.

Also I setup alerts - for >50% CPU or >90% disk full. I do get an alert but it doesn't say which volume or how full is it - what was the actual value that triggered sending the alert. WTF.

We migrated from newrelic to datadog (for cost reasons LMAO) a while back and I miss NRQL every single day I'm building a dashboard.

I enjoy having everything instrumented and in one spot, it's super powerful, but I am currently advocating for self hosting loki so that we can have debug+ level logs across all environments for a much much lower cost. Datadog is really good at identifying anomalies, but the cost for logs is so high there's a non-trivial amount of savings in sampling and minimizing logging. I HATE that we have told devs "don't log so much" -- that misses the entire point of building out a haystack. And sampling logs at 1%, and only logging warnings+ in prod makes it even harder to identify anomalies in lower environments before a prod release.

last hot take: The UX in kibana in 2016 was better than anything else we have now for rapidly searching through a big haystack, and identifying and correlating issues in logs.

Doesn't seem like this can visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can :(

You can make a tool that’s both powerful and usable. Datadog did it. Adobe did it. There is no downside to usability.

> Can this visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can?

IIUC, Grafana connects directly to Honeycomb via its API to visualize data without storing it. Instana, on the other hand, is a bit different. It needs telemetry data to be ingested into backend before it can be visualized in UI. With Honeycomb, this could be possible if the data can be exported from Honeycomb to Instana.

Can this visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can?

what do you use instead and what does it give you that you can't get from datadog? as someone who's been locked into datadog for the past few years i'm wondering what i've been missing.