Once a startup reaches any modicum of success, observability becomes a must have tool for their engineering organization (and they will usually adopt it before then anyway). Downtime is basically the worst possible thing that can happen to an engineering team and they will do, and pay for, pretty much anything that will help them proactively avoid it. This, among other dynamics, is why Datadog can charge millions of dollars and observability can make up 20-30% of a company’s entire infrastructure bill.
That being said…companies in this category are relatively mature, and there aren’t necessarily giant differences in their feature sets that matter to buyers. A lot of a buyer’s choice comes down to open source vs. closed source. All in all, you're looking at 20+ legitimate, mature vendor options here. Welcome to the wild world of observability.
So far in this category, we’ve covered Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, and New Relic.
