alt Hacker NewsI see you regret Datadog but there's no alternative - did you end up homebrewing metrics, or are you just living with their insane pricing model? In my experience they suck but not enough to leave.
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Not author but Prometheus is perfectly acceptable alternative if you don't want to go whole Otel route.
Currently going through leaving DD at work. Many potential options, many companies trying to break in. The one that calls to me spiritually is: throw it all in Clickhouse (hosted Clickhouse is shockingly cheap) with a hosted HyperDX (logs and metrics UI) instance in front of it. HyperDX has its issues, but it's shocking how cheap it is to toss a couple hundred TB of logs/metrics into Clickhouse per month (compared to the kings ransom DD charges). And you can just query the raw rows, which really comes in handy for understanding some in-the-weeds metrics questions.
LGTM stack?
"No alternative" isn't quite right anymore, though I understand the feeling. The real problem with Datadog isn't the pricing - it's that their per-host model incentivizes you to care about infrastructure topology rather than user-facing behavior. You end up with 10,000 dashboards and still can't answer "is checkout broken right now?"
The open source stack has gotten genuinely viable: Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Grafana for viz, and OpenTelemetry as the collection layer means you're not locked into anyone's agent. The gap used to be in correlation - connecting a metric spike to a trace to a log line - but that's narrowed significantly.
The actual hard part of leaving DD isn't technical, it's organizational. DD becomes load-bearing for on-call runbooks, alert routing, and team muscle memory. Migration is less "swap the backend" and more "retrain your incident response."
If you're evaluating: the question I'd ask isn't "which vendor has the best dashboards" but "can I get from alert to root cause in under 5 minutes with this tool?" That's the metric that actually correlates with MTTR, and it's where most monitoring setups (including expensive ones) fail.
VictoriaMetrics stack. Better, cheaper, faster queries, more k8s native, etc. Easy to run with budget saved from not being on Datadog + attracts smart and observability minded engineers to your team.