I always figured it was because they have to pay the 27 reps that call and email me monthly begging to set up a meeting because I looked up their service once several years ago and asked for pricing.
There's so much more expensive than the alternatives I really had no choice.
Oh, you went with Splunk, I see. Well, can I get a meeting with you to explain why we're so much better and you would be much happier with us.
No, I'm not going to reinitiate this working completed project and pay three times more for my data munging.
Bc when entire infra teams rely on your service to operate, and orgs depend on infra, you can charge for that service bc orgs have to pay it, or degrade to cheaper, less robust alternatives - which do exist
They're pretty good, they're better, but they're not that much better than Splunk or Elasticsearch (especially the value with Elasticsearch community) I admit elasticsearch gets pricey if you go corporate.
But Splunk, they're like 80% of the product at 20% of the price
A monitoring service for IT systems. It uses an agent that is installed on servers or as a container, that sends metrics and/or logs to Datadog's platform. You can then set up dashboards, notifications and alerting in their webgui.
I just read the article, it's actually pretty interesting.
The TL;DR is that there is so much observable data out there (exponentially more than expected), that Datadog, which isn't optimized to deal with that, caused their prices to need to hike.
There are two options listed as alternatives:
Self host but it might not be cheaper
Buy into a company that is from the ground up focusing on dealing with that massive amount of data.
its an incredibly powerful tool. I've seen its usage bloom from simple box health to actually determining cost per month of services. basically going from a "hows our server looking?" to a "we need this tool to achieve our margins"