My understanding is that DD is widely regarded as one of the best observability platforms if you can stomach the bill. Could you elaborate on the comment that DD is "useless"? Would love to understand where it comes short compared to other platforms.
the whole pipeline: from an SDK to add metrics collection to your program, to an agent running on machines, to a collector for those stats, to a dashboard with pretty graphs you can use, sliced up in meaningful ways, and to monitor/troubleshoot problems when they arise, to alerting, so you don't have to worry about the system not running when you're not looking at it.
IMO, I wouldn't call it useless, it's "useless for most teams".
I've been at many companies where they roll out Datadog and collect a crap ton of metrics/logs and so forth. Teams act all gung ho about "being data driven team" but quickly learn, almost all the numbers don't matter. As SRE, I attempt to drill down but any observations are met with silence or "Oh yea, that, meh, toss another 2 cores at the problem and let's move on."
At the cost of Datadog, their cost rarely exceeds outage cost or higher cloud bill cost. If you think you need it, buy it for a year where you can probably get good discount rate, use the data to rapidly improve most glaring issues you have then cancel the contract until you need it again in 3 years.
Obviously, if you are in highly responsive business, none of this applies but for us just cranking out B2B Rest APIs, you will be fine without Datadog.
