[troutwine]

Prior to the acquisition Stackdriver was never best of breed among its peer group but it was acceptable. Post-acquisition the feature set appears as an end user to have more or less frozen and their UIs feel haphazard: dashboarding is a mess, the trace UI is very complex without really giving me greater query power over alternatives and the options for converting one kind of data stream into another (logs to metrics, traces to logs to metrics etc) just aren't there. Google tightly integrates Stackdriver into its other products -- I assume that's where most of the labor for the Stackdriver team has gone -- but it feels cheap and like they've had to intentionally limit options to force buy-in. For what it is, Stackdriver is surprisingly expensive and their SDKs are quite complicated for what they end up accomplishing. Why should the end-user need to internalize Stackdriver Metrics' API to be able to produce metrics about their application? (I am sympathetic to the notion that this SDK is low-level and meant to be consumed by higher-level APIs like OpenTelemetry et al).

Nowadays the Stackdriver suite just feels left behind. There's plenty of other options in this space that have a nice internal integration and are reasonably inexpensive to purchase, or run yourself. If Stackdriver weren't so tightly integrated with Google's other cloud products I have to imagine it would get even less use than it does now.