I'm sorry but the amount of companies that need something like DataDog is quite small compared to their 30,000+ customer count. Maybe 5,000 companies on Earth truly need something like DataDog, 80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana.

Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain overall from using DataDog but only from truly open source solutions that utilized AGPL licenses that allows everyone to move forward together + share lessons together + contribute together toward a common goal of better observability.

Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? This isn't the 1990s, it's 2026. Tooling has gotten quite good over the last decade.

Also corporations stupidly spend money all the time, they over spend too. I recently left a company that was paying SalesForce $10mil a year in licenses when only 8 people in the entire 3,000 person company was using it. I doubt that was the only single instance across our industry too. There is a massive amount of waste and graft in enterprise sales.

I honestly doubt it if you replaced grafana for 10,000 DataDog customers they would notice the difference.

> Why are we acting like it's hard to set up?

Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky.

The expertise just isn’t there at most companies.