Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bhyolken 951 days ago
Author here, thanks for the question! The current split developed from the personal preferences of the engineers who initially set up our observability systems, based on what they had used (and liked) at previous jobs.

We're definitely open to doing more consolidation in the future, especially if we can save money by doing that, but from a usability standpoint we've been pretty happy with Honeycomb for traces and Datadog for everything else so far. And, that seems to be aligned with what each vendor is best at at the moment.
1 comments
MuffinFlavored 951 days ago
> from the personal preferences of the engineers

https://www.honeycomb.io/pricing

https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/

Am I wrong to say... having 2 is "expensive"? Maybe not if 50% of your stuff is going to Honeycomb and 50% going to DataDog. Could you save money/complexity (less places to look for things) having just DataDog or just Honeycomb?

link
bhyolken 951 days ago
Right now, there isn't much duplication of what we're sending to each vendor, so I don't think we'd save a ton by consolidating, at least based on list prices. We could maybe negotiate better prices based on higher volumes, but I'm not sure if Airplane is spending enough at this point to get massive discounts there.

Another potential benefit would definitely be reduced complexity and better integration for the engineering team. So, for instance, you could look at a log and then more easily navigate to the UI for the associated trace. Currently, we do this by putting Honeycomb URLs in our Datadog log events, which works but isn't quite as seamless. But, given that our team is pretty small at this point and that we're not spending a ton of our time on performance optimizations, we don't feel an urgent need to consolidate (yet).

link
MuffinFlavored 951 days ago
When you say DataDog for everything else (as in not traces), besides logs, what else do you mean?
link
claytonjy 951 days ago
Metrics, probably? The article calls out logs, metrics, and traces as the 3 pillars of observability.
link
bhyolken 951 days ago
Yeah, metrics and logs, plus a few other things that depend on these (alerts, SLOs, metric-based dashboards, etc.).
link