| I love seeing open source alternatives to these major vendors. IMO the reason these vendors can and do charge so much is not because telemetry software is hard. Its because managing data at large volumes is incredibly challenging. No matter what solution you pick, you're going to hit scaling issues eventually. Sure you can start with a single instance, but eventually you're going to need to shard, backup, replicate, etc... If you're running a saas business with uptime expectations from your customers then your telemetry systems need to be rock solid. This means either paying through the nose for a system that is mostly going to work. Or spinning up a team of engineers to active manage and operate your telemetry systems, and then spending years making your system rock solid. Managing these systems is a challenging problem and its not one that most software engineers want to do or will enjoy. So its difficult to find the right people. |
I still very much appreciate the open source stuff as it at least keeps vendors honest.