Grafana > Datadog · PocketArC Datadog"/> Datadog"/><br>/projects

Grafana > Datadog<br>Datadog" width="2400" height="1260" decoding="async" data-nimg="1" class="shadow-sm rounded w-full" style="color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 320 160'%3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/webp;base64,UklGRsoAAABXRUJQVlA4TL0AAAAvB8AAAM1VICICHgiwCQAAAIBtVygCQIAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAnI9QAAADwQcBQAAACA878fPgQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACABFC1eSDgKAAAAADnf+/FIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgCUGWL7B6EIB8AJAxRBQKwJCUGY++5Vn1Pcf6/nVPuBZyh03pVcmRftatl79aa09UA'/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 1152px) 100vw, 1112px" srcSet="/cdn-cgi/image/width=640,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 640w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=750,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 750w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=828,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 828w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=1080,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 1080w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 1200w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=1920,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 1920w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=2048,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 2048w, /cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp 3840w" src="/cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,format=auto,sharpen=1,quality=90/_next/static/media/cover.f3842750.webp"/><br>August 16, 2026

Datadog is a good product. I remember the first time I used it, it blew my mind having ALL OF THAT VISIBILITY into everything. All the little premade integrations as well, it slotted straight into our app and infrastructure and provided visibility I had never even dreamed of.

The problem is pricing. It is unjustifiably expensive for random little side projects, and it is exorbitantly priced for bigger companies, and it gets more and more expensive the more you integrate with Datadog. Logs, APM, new machines, etc, it all costs -a lot-. Every time one of my teams wanted to instrument more of our systems, we had to think about its impact on business costs, and it was a whole thing.

And for what? A database that stores logs, and shows them with a pretty UI? Like I get it if you're petabyte scale and need some SERIOUS web-scale observability. But a company doing a few GBs of data / month (even a few TBs)? You can literally buy 32TB disks for ~$800, and you get your 30/60/90-day retention forever.

So I rebuilt the whole thing on my own side-project servers, as a proof-of-concept. Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Grafana as the neat UI, and OpenTelemetry to standardise the way I emit telemetry in my projects (no ddtrace agent to install!).

A random little side project. Not a lot of traffic, but at least now I know how much traffic does actually flow through it. OBSERVABILITY OP.<br>My apps don't need a backend in their config at all; they emit OTLP into a collector, and the collector will route it to wherever I've pointed it.

The same JSON logs I was already emitting, but now they're stored properly, and queriable.<br>The traces are the part that makes me super happy, because they get me thinking about how nice it'll be when I hook this up to real projects, with the whole web > backend > db distributed tracing thing. I had that in Datadog, but it was expensive and I always felt sad that I couldn't expand my use of it. But now, it's all free:

Microsecond spans, kept at full resolution, sample rate 1.0, because there is no metering and I can store whatever I want, and you can't stop me.<br>Obligatory AI mention: Thanks to AI, I set the whole thing up with Ansible and learned a ton along the way and the "learning curve" of self-hosting your own observability went down dramatically. I had had Grafana in my "to figure out" list for the longest time and now... well, it's figured out.

All of it is open source and runs on hardware I'm already paying for, so the only real cost of the stack is disk space. This isn't the same as unlimited, but my limit is however much disk space I'm willing to buy, and disk space is cheap, so who cares. I keep everything, for as long as I feel like keeping it, and I never ever have to think about how...