[techostritch]

> it sure shouldn't cost less to do it yourself.

This is an interesting point and something I often wonder about. I think there's a number of different reasons for it, obviously markup and the need to make a profit, but one thing I realized is that when you buy something like AWS, you're often paying for the platinum version, with redundant power, networking, etc, and not the bronze version, which a lot of people would settle for. If I setup my one single instance Grafana VM or physical server, it's going to be a lot less expensive than a solution that's both multiple layers of "platinum" and multiple layers of "markup"

Datadog probably runs on the cloud, which means you get the cloud markup and datadog's mark up both built in.

[ctvo]

> I realized is that when you buy something like AWS, you're often paying for the platinum version, with redundant power, networking, etc, and not the bronze version, which a lot of people would settle for.

This is the difference in most cases.

Just taking availability as an example. Datadog has a 99.8% availability SLA. I suspect most companies would be fine paying for a 99% availability SLA, for example, at 1/4th the cost, but in most cases there's no way to scale down SLAs like that and launch a cheaper version.

There is a giant leap in cost (complexity, staffing, etc.) between 99% and 99.9% that most of these home grown solutions don't account for.

These nuances are lost in posts like these, and it is tiring.

[Dylan16807]

99% is down three days a year, and 99.8% can still go down for 17 hours each year.

Neither of those is particularly hard to reach. The cost increase to go from one to the other is not a big percentage.

What do you even get if the SLA is breached? Looking it up I see it excludes planned maintenance, and "in the event the Service availability drops below 99.8% for two consecutive months, Customer may terminate the Service". That's useless.