[honeybadger223]

Depends on what you want to monitor. Grafana is pretty decent, but the real draw to Datadog is their APM stack. The UI for tracing and looking at stuff is pretty awesome.

Though you could get most things into Grafana with something like Prometheus. The problem with Grafana is understanding what the limitations are. If you're not careful with the number of panels and such it can get quite slow.

I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough.

If you need to monitor some infrastructure you can just use Telegraf and output it to Grafana if needed. It kinda falls apart though because another great benefit of something like Datadog is not managing a time series db. That can get ugly real quick.

I guess it all just depends. If my bill was super high I wouldn't mind spending some resources on Prom/Grafana if you're in the Kube space or some Telegraf/InfluxDB if you're not.

I've also heard good things about Timescale but haven't used it.

[davkal]

> I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough.

Hi, I run the Grafana team at Grafana Labs. I'd love to learn more about your Grafonnet use to help us build something better. I'm david at grafana com

[slyall]

Depends a lot what sort of scale you are on too. Grafana Cloud will be cheaper than DD but is not quite as end-user friendly.

Running it yourself is not too hard up if you are not having to do clustering ( say 1m metric series, 100GB/day logs). But different people have different comfort levels for that.

With any monitoring system most of the work is actually making use of the data. Tagging, Alerts, Dashboards and especially onboarding all the teams. You can spend a lot of time and money rolling something out and then barely anybody uses it.