[tailspin2019]

Nicely designed site, great logo, but after clicking around a bit (and looking at GitHub) I’m confused by what this product actually is.

DataDog has a UI. Does Opstrace? Or is it just a CLI/API based tool?

If you actually have a UI element to your product you’re doing a huge disservice to yourself by not actually showing this anywhere...

EDIT: I don’t mean to sound negative, I’m wondering if positioning this against Datadog is going to create immediate, potentially incorrect, expectations in people’s minds as to what this product might provide.

From first impressions I’d say this is much closer to Prometheus (which does have a UI but it’s so basic it may as well not - but then the UI is not the point of Prometheus).

[fat-apple]

Thanks for that feedback - we've got a lot of work to do to make that more clear! We're still early in our journey so we’re not there yet, but we’re moving fast. We're working on a new collaborative UI for interacting with your data in a way that solves a lot of problems we've witnessed with current monitoring UIs (let me know if you want more detail). It's in early development and we haven't released it yet, so while Opstrace does have a UI now, it's currently limited to system management (adding/removing users and tenants). For interacting with data, we currently ship a Grafana instance per tenant. The roadmap has some basic information about this (might not be something you stumbled across). Let me know if I can clarify anything else. https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap

[tailspin2019]

Thanks for clarifying. I think all the great work you’re doing on this is at risk of being diminished by pushing the DataDog comparison so hard when really there is (currently) no comparison in my view.

Not to say you won’t get there, but why not shout about your current strengths right now (if you’re going to talk about the product) and not necessarily where you hope to be.

I only make this point because the “open source DataDog” headline just spins me off in the complete wrong direction as a newcomer and I end up confused and somewhat underwhelmed. With better positioning this wouldn’t have been the case!

That said, the project looks v interesting so keep up the good work and I hope you take my constructive criticism in the way it’s intended!

[fat-apple]

Thanks for the great feedback, definitely understand where you're coming from and we'll keep that in mind moving forward! Very much appreciate the constructive criticism!

[Denzel]

The headline feels deliberately clickbait-y and disingenuous. I love and support the idea. Aspirationally, the founders may want to compete with Datadog, but OpsTrace overlaps some small percentage of Datadog’s feature set.

I’m surprised the mods haven’t edited this title.

Source: I’m an engineer that’s used, operated and hacked on a medium-sized prom+grafana; and used Datadog at a large, multi-region, global scale.

[jgehrcke]

I'd love to chime in, too, and say thank you for sharing this perspective. It's totally understandable, and this HN thread wouldn't be complete and genuine w/o this talking point. Based on your experience, we'd certainly appreciate for you to keep an eye on how our product evolves! Super interested in your expertise and opinions. Thanks again for not being afraid of being 'that guy'.

[dang]

Sorry about that! I didn't see anything wrong with the title but I'm not familiar with Datadog's feature set. If you take the title as aspirational, it may make more sense.

[Denzel]

No need to be sorry, you do a great job moderating HN dang!

I just felt let down because the promise of the title (which I was excited by) doesn’t match reality in that it’s quite impossible to deliver Datadog’s feature set for metrics, traces, and logs — and tie all three together — on top of prometheus+grafana because the underlying TSDB doesn’t even support the notion of user-customizable indexing. Prometheus indexes all labels, which is why most Prometheus users even have to worry about high cardinality and time series explosion. This is one point highlighting how OpsTrace’s current architecture can not satisfy their positioning; there are many more. I’m sure they’re aware of them.

As an aspiration, the title makes sense. As someone in their target market, I was a bit turned off by the embellishment.

[fat-apple]

We’re truly sorry that you felt let down! You raise a great point that is worth clarifying though. All logs, metrics and future traces are stored in S3/GCS (and yes metrics are stored in TSDB format). While this does not allow a single query language to ask questions across all these sources in one query (yet), it is absolutely possible to build what Datadog is with a new user interface. To go even further, now that it’s all in one place (S3/GCS) other technologies can be leveraged to create a higher level query language across everything, such as PrestoDB (one would have to build backends for it), or even a new dedicated open source columnar store.

[Denzel]

> other technologies can be leveraged

That’s my point: your software architecture must evolve to deliver on your promises (open-source Datadog) because it’s impossible to satisfy your promises with the architecture as it exists today.

Nonetheless, I appreciate all the responses. Good luck to OpsTrace!

[spahl]

Totally fair. It's a fine line we have to walk.

[spahl]

It's definitely aspirational. With time and work the features gap (for the important ones) will narrow:-)

What we want to emphasize is that it is possible to build this and have the advantages of a Datadog without the drawbacks.

[fat-apple]

Thanks for your support! We’re still early in our journey when compared to the featureset Datadog has built over time, but we definitely aspire to bridge the best of Datadog and open source. Based on your experience, what sorts of features would you prioritize to get there?