DRUIDS: Datadog Reusable User Interface Design System

[rajveermalviya]

> DRUIDS is not an open source design system. These guidelines are specifically for internal Datadog users. [1]

even npm package[2] asks for login

[1] https://druids.datadoghq.com/foundations/contribute

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@druids/ui

[solardev]

Awwwwwwwwwwww... that makes me SO sad. I LOVE Datadog's dashboards and UI and was so excited that they opened it up. Finally some competition for MUI, I thought, but nope :(

[bagels]

I don't know why they couldn't put a friendly version of that message on the landing page.

[leangeek]

Key factor here that people should know.

[Dowwie]

I tried out this design system but got a bill for $125,000 for scrolling charges

[afandian]

Context?

[lelo_tp]

Really awesome work on the "examples" section. As someone personally working on a design system docs, I admire the team's thoughtfulness on building that

[zomglings]

WOW.

This is some of the best documentation I have ever seen, and a very elegant design, too.

WOW.

I am working on documentation for my own product right now, and this is inspiring.

[jjcm]

Other great sources of DS docs:

https://atlassian.design

https://carbondesignsystem.com/

https://polaris.shopify.com/

Obv for non-DS docs, Stripe's docs are gold medalists.

[Cthulhu_]

This is the difference when you have dedicated, well-funded teams for which the design is the product. For most developers, it's something they are made to do on the side - I mean, "but you're a full stack developer, right??".

[duiker101]

OK, I am not one for complaining about designs, and I'm not even going to say this is bad.

But for some reason, I can't even look at the page. It's giving me a headache, just a few seconds of looking at it makes me feel... very off. Almost feel like I'm staring at an optical illusion. Super weird.

[pdntspa]

I can really appreciate the weirdness of the aesthetic in an age where every startup has to make everything cute and fashionable

[weldedtogether]

Besides the product itself, I can appreciate the lengths gone to make DRUIDS work as an acronym, and the more fun UI/logo elements present.

[jon-wood]

I'm curious, what is it that drives every tech company to eventually publish a UI framework? I get the value of having an internal UI framework which allows anyone in an organisation to quickly throw something together which is at least vaguely in line with branding and UI patterns, but what value do they get from then making that available to the general public. Surely it just puts a burden on the maintainers because they can no longer just send a quick email or Slack message to the relevant channel saying "we're going to break backwards compatibility for widget X, make sure you update".

[ctvo]

> I'm curious, what is it that drives every tech company to eventually publish a UI framework? I get the value of having an internal UI framework which allows anyone in an organisation to quickly throw something together which is at least vaguely in line with branding and UI patterns, but what value do they get from then making that available to the general public.

It makes their front-end engineers and designers happy and acts as a recruiting tool: Look at what we're building for internal use and our culture of open source contributions.

> Surely it just puts a burden on the maintainers because they can no longer just send a quick email or Slack message to the relevant channel saying "we're going to break backwards compatibility for widget X, make sure you update".

It sometimes does, if they bother to support public issues vs. it being available but mostly only supporting internal use cases.

[nijave]

One place I worked did that because it made development/packaging easier. You didn't need to maintain a private repo with auth for something that eventually gets published publicly anyway

[indymike]

> I'm curious, what is it that drives every tech company to eventually publish a UI framework?

1. Low risk. Not likely to create competitors or give away the secret sauce.

2. Allows partners to build lookalikes/similar look and feel apps.

3. Enables vendors/partners to contribute in a meaningful way that helps both parties.

[yevpats]

I always wonder why you need a design system for a dev first product. MaterialUI + theme palette would be enough most probably but I guess its the (soon to be over) age of free money.

[vosper]

I hear you on "don't build your own design system"... but Datadog's got a really complex UI, I think they've definitely graduated past the point where something like MUI would be a good choice (and obviously they have the resources to do an internal design system, and do it well).

For Datadog I think it makes sense.

[wzy]

Material UI... in 2022? Why not just return to Bootstrap?

[alx__]

Using something like Material UI is always a great idea to get you moving quickly. But eventually you reach an annoyance point once you scale up the number of components you're creating. Especially if you need more customized things. The layers of hacks and work around start to get confusing. And new folks give you lots of WTF comments.

Same reason people build new libraries or languages. They feel limited by the "thing" they're using. :)

[whalesalad]

I cannot wait for material ui to die and go by the wayside

[corytheboyd]

I was JUST thinking of building a small web app for viewing local structured JSON logs with a subset of the features in the Datadog logs explorer. It'd be a nice little bonus to build the UI with the same components!

[tgtweak]

I find datadog's UX to be one of the least user friendly and find myself constantly frustrated by how inconsistent it is. Looking at a time span in logs? Click a link to a trace in APM and it's reset.

Looking at process cpu use and there's no time scale...

Some visualizations you can cross filter on, some you can't. Some only hide things in that specific visualization.

It's also very slow.

It also doesn't work at all on mobile.

Not sure why anyone would be jumping to use this.

[chainwax]

Isn't DRUIDS a reference to something? I swear I remember it being from a TV show, but I can't quite remember.

[WFHRenaissance]

Say what you want about Datadog's pricing and sales tactics... the product is a joy to use.

[dilyevsky]

When my team was forced to use it a few years ago it was order of magnitude more expensive than diy prometheus/grafana while being less friendly to devs - their metric query language absolutely sucked. Was more friendly to non-devs who liked pretty ui tho…

We also had some collector troubles and support basically did nothing but wasted our time in calls repeatedly

[bdcravens]

They have a good product, but no matter how good it is, after the experience I had with their sales, I will never use the service again.

[3pt14159]

When it works, it is awesome.

But there are some caveats. Facets can break in unexpected ways and the last time you want to be dealing with this is when you're dealing with a fire in production.

[codegeek]

Agreed. I had the same experience though as many others when it comes to Sales. I understand it is a complex product but they couldn't demo me anything even after 2 meetings. They wanted a 3rd meeting for the demo even though I made it clear on the 1st meeting that I am only interested in specific products (log monitoring etc) and would be good to see a demo in 2nd meeting.

Too much friction in their sales process. But I guess I am not the target audience.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Are you kidding? It's visual vomit and takes 3-4 clicks to get to relevant data. The only "great" thing about it could be the tracing but something you can easily get with OpenTracing/Jaeger. I have to use Datadog daily and sorely miss Grafana.

[sv123]

I love searching and faceting in the logs and building quick charts off of measures within the results... so easy to find things and drill into problems.

[cloudlyn]

I wasted my time reading the release post.

[philsnow]

Datadog's product is a bit too close to Apache Druid to have named their design system so similarly.

From https://druid.apache.org/ :

> Druid unlocks new types of queries and workflows for clickstream, APM, supply chain, network telemetry, digital marketing, risk/fraud, and many other types of data. Druid is purpose built for rapid, ad-hoc queries on both real-time and historical data.

[munk-a]

I'm really curious what kind of UX riddle this "Mystery of the DRUIDS" everyone keeps talking about is.

[hardwaresofton]

Does anyone know/recognize what this documentation site is built with? It's fantastic.

Custom, perhaps?

[mattacular]

It definitely looks custom.

[antoineMoPa]

Is this the same Datadog that sends spam calls to developers after office hours to sell their tools?

[scop]

Yup. I find their sales strategy deplorable as not only do they cold call like crazy, but their presence at conferences are all sales and no meat.

For example early on in AWS Lambda’s life, DataDog was hosting a session at reInvent that looked like a semi-advanced dive into the new technology. Awesome! I was legitimately excited and thought this might be one of the better sessions of the conference. I show up only to find it is 30 minutes of stand up comedy, 10 minutes of the most basic “how to create a lambda function” tutorial (probably ripped right from Jeff Barr’s blog), and 15 minutes of “you should buy DataDog”.

To this day, we use “DataDog” as in team meetings as a term to communicate shadiness etc.

(Edited to fix typo on Barr’s name)

[marcrosoft]

Their billing practices aren’t great either. Non transparent pricing, requiring docusign after signup to change plans, and no refunds for unused services.

[EwanToo]

Yes, their sales team is far too aggressive, I can't imagine it's successful for building their brand with developers

[Linell]

I too have had more spam calls from Datadog than any other tech company. Their product seems great but after what feels like harassment, I’ve never wanted to give them my money.

[_b0t]

I'll never use Datadog for this reason. I have been pestered by so many salesmen _relentlessly_, even after saying I was not interested.

[j_kao]

How does one go about removing a phone number off of these sales data aggregators?

I don't think I've ever explicitly given these phone numbers to tools like this (e.g. signing up to Datadog with a phone number), so this seems like sensitive PII that must have been leaked and scraped in some shady source that these sales "data-enrichment" tools happily take.

[bdcravens]

Also the same Datadog that in order to give us a price break due to a misconfiguration, strong-armed us into signing up for additional monitoring.

[LaserToy]

ASS - acronym’s seriously suck

[worldmerge]

Wish I could use this