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Datadog acquires Quickwit
- bk146 2y agoCurious what Datadog is going to build with this tech. Believe this company pitching themselves as OSS competitor to Datadog a few months ago.
- okbro 2y agoBased on the [press release](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-quickwit/ https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-quickwit/) it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model for customers that can't use pure SaaS solutions due to regulations: > Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries must meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers’ environments or specific regions, hindering teams’ ability to attain seamless observability and insight. To help our customers meet these requirements without sacrificing visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are pleased to announce that Quickwit—a popular open source distributed search engine—is joining Datadog.
- everfrustrated 2y ago>it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time, which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a natural expansion opportunity. I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going forward.
- spamizbad 2y agoWe switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.
- samjewell 2y agoI work at Grafana. Can you say more about what specifically you don’t recommend?
- Multicomp 2y agoNot OP, but looked at doing grafana self hosted for similar reasons. The tooling is too spread out across different installables, the common golden signals and other monitoring metrics have a high learning curve / cliff more like it, and there's not good enough documentation to cover the user from "I want to do a synthetics test on a service to see if it is alive and show the results of that test in a graph"...a journey like that involves 4+ different tools.
- spamizbad 2y agoDD was just easier to use for everybody, has lots of useful baked-in things we liked to use (apdex scores), and was intuitive enough that non-devs could design their own dashboards. We also found it way easier to collect metrics, traces, and other things. FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO. And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where we'll never go back.
- benreesman 2y agoI’ve historically been a pretty big fan of Grafana, I’ve advocated for the cloud solution at more than one company. But it seems like business development has utterly hijacked the experience. The flow you want out of the box is Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with one button that drops you the config for grafana-agent (now alloy which seems good technically but brings a whole new config language with some truly insane discoverability problems) that makes graphs on screens, you build up from there. But these days everything is some complicated co-sell, up-sell, click farming hedge maze through 90 kinds of cloud vendor rip-off half baked thing. Graphs, logs, traces out of the box. Put all the works with Snowflake shit behind an icon. A small one.
- winrid 2y agoI could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra with this as a potential cost saving measure.
- andrewstuart2 2y agoAnd then I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto customers given the current crazy high prices.
- zerd 2y agoThe architecture of Husky seems fairly similar to quickwit. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky/ https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky... https://quickwit.io/docs/main-branch/overview/architecture https://quickwit.io/docs/main-branch/overview/architecture
- akshayshah 2y agoIt’s an ourobouros of influences: the Husky creators left DD to make Warpstream, Warpstream inspired Quickwit, and now Quickwit is joining DD.
- leeoniya 2y agoand Confluent acquired WarpStream
- fulmicoton 2y agoNo. Quickwit was founded well before Warpstream and it did not inspire us. The Husky blog post was released after we released a few versions of quickwit if I recall correctly. It was not an inspiration either. As far as I know, the similarities are fortuitous.
- politelemon 2y agoA larger bill for enterprise customers.
- everfrustrated 2y agoPretty clear they want it to keep a moat on their side. Can't see Datadog continuing investing in this - it's a pretty direct competitor. What happened to Vector the last opensource they bought? Are they still hired?
- ripley12 2y ago(disclaimer: Datadog employee) I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector employees still work here.
- bfung 2y ago(Disclaimer: also datadog employee) I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source. Just confirming strongly what ripley12 said, as a person with direct involvement in OSS at Datadog.
- slt2021 2y agoarguably they acquired them so they dont build anything further with this tech, as it threatens renewals of their existing enterprise contracts
- hijinks 2y agothey are planning to allow you to run your logs in your own datacenter/cloud and put something like a proxy there or being built into quickwit that your logs show up in the datadog UI My guess is you will be billed per gig or something but not nearly the cost of shipping your logs to DD
- Hixon10 2y agoIt's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired. They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations. 1. https://www.warpstream.com/ https://www.warpstream.com/ 2. https://www.orioledb.com/ https://www.orioledb.com/ 3. https://quickwit.io/ https://quickwit.io/
- oliverrice 2y ago(disclaimer: supabase employee) OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase and everywhere else. Happy to hear any concerns you have
- chrisweekly 2y agoPlease forgive and help remedy my ignorance: it's a coherent goal to want OrioleDB to be the go-to storage engine for Postgres, on Supabase?
- oliverrice 2y agoI don't want to hijack Datadogs+Quickwit's post comment section with unrelated promotional-looking info. Quick summary below but if you have any other questions pls tag olirice in a Supabase GH discussion. The OrioleDB storage engine for postgres is a drop-in replacement for the default heap method. Its takes advantage of modern hardware (e.g. SSDs) and cloud infrastructure. The most basic benefit is that throughput at scale is > 5x higher than heap [1], but it also is architected for a bunch of other cool stuff [2]. copy-on-write unblocks branching. row-level-WAL enables an S3 backend and scale-to-zero compute. The combination of those two makes it a suitable target for multi-master. So yes, given that it could greatly improve performance on the platform, it is a goal to release in Supabase's primary image once everything is buttoned up. Note that an OrioleDB release doesn't take away any of your existing options. Its implemented as an extension so users would be able to optionally create all heap tables, all orioledb tables, or a mix of both. [1] https://www.orioledb.com/blog/orioledb-beta7-benchmarks https://www.orioledb.com/blog/orioledb-beta7-benchmarks [2] https://www.orioledb.com/docs https://www.orioledb.com/docs
- gnabgib 2y agoRelated: Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit (228 points, 6 months ago, 195 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701 Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
- aseipp 2y agoWell, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on": > We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy. So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring. Congrats to the team, in any case!
- mindcrash 2y ago"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?" They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hopes that the community picks up the tab. I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse. By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock solid product. - https://vector.dev/ https://vector.dev/
- everfrustrated 2y agoThey bought Vector - it was always opensource
- Dylan1312 2y agoVector was already OSS when they acquired the company that created it, timber. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-technologies-vector/ https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-techn...
- 2y ago
- psanford 2y agoHappy that Quickwit is going to Apache 2. Sad that the team won't be working on it anymore. I loved that I was able to setup Quickwit on AWS lambda and have a good cloud based search engine for $0.01 / month.
- francoismassot 2y agoCo-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment. HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts: - Searching the web for under $1000/month [0] - A Rust optimization story [1] - Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2] - Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512) [3] - Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4] - A compressed indexable bitset [5] - Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog [6] - Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7] - Tantivy – full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene [8] - Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9] - Datadog acquires Quickwit [10] Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to contribute something valuable to our community. I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This community's authenticity and passion for technology are unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this. Thank you all :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043
- nextaccountic 2y agoI think you forgot to add the links Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source) Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?
- jhgg 2y agoHoping this leads to datadog launching a logging solution that does not cost an arm and a leg at scale.
- iandanforth 2y agoHonestly this is my only criticism of datadog. The product is great but good lord that pricing.
- rizky05 2y ago[dead]
- bdcravens 2y agoBased on my experience with them, this isn't a technical or product issue, but a cultural one. (DD is very sales-driven, in a bad way)
- maxwellg 2y ago> Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user experience. I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by a competitor after that.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoIt's a risk you deal with giving back to open source. The good part for the rest of us is it's a signal that there's likely some appetite for a fork if Datadog screws the pooch.
- sealeck 2y agoEither they did it on their own, in which case that's open source for you, or they have some kind of contract with quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't have some clauses which handle this.
- liminal 2y agoWe just moved from Elastic to Quickwit. Sigh. What other open source, object storage backed logging databases do people recommend?
- tdubey 2y agoLoki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ https://grafana.com/oss/loki/). There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe its much more mature now.
- ed_mercer 2y agoJust don’t look at the list of open issues and the lack of responses.
- mcpeepants 2y agoLoki is significantly different in several ways, including the lack of full-text indexing.
- valyala 2y agoLoki has the following problems: - It is non-trivial to setup and operate. It requires properly configuring and orchestrating numerous components - distributor, ingestor, querier, query frontend, compactor, consul, ruler, memcache, index service, etc. - see https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/architecture/ https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/architectur... - Its' configs tend to break with every new release, since some configs become obsolete and some configs change names and/or structure. - It is very slow on "needle in the haystack" queries such as "search for logs containing some rarely seen trace_id", since it needs to read, unpack and scan all the logs at object storage. This may be also very expensive if the object storage service charges for read IO. - It doesn't support log fields with big number of unique values (aka high-cardinality log fields). It you'll try storing logs with high-cardinality fields into Loki, then it will quickly explode with enormous RAM usage. Recent Loki releases provide half-baked solution for this problem - "structured metadata" ( https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/labels/structured-metadata/ https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/labels/stru... ), but it is still experimental and requires non-trivial configs (aka it doesn't work).
- scop 2y agoI hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk and happy and think Datadog is cool. Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim to deserve a second look?
- orf 2y agoWhat does any of that have to do with the actual product?
- scop 2y agoIt made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight with me in answering my question?
- film42 2y agoThe product itself is very good, but the sales process is truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?" They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just bad, it's comically bad.
- ipaddr 2y agoThat is their product. You want to cancel? Send the army of clowns.
- baobun 2y agoDifferent person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever. We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest. The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated. If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dirtshell 2y agoDo any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.
- geraldwhen 2y agoLarge json logs just won’t appear for hours, which makes it so fun to debug issues in deployed environments! Showing ALL the logs isn’t cool. Showing SOME logs at random is cool.
- SteveNuts 2y agoMy biggest issue with them is the absolutely, hilariously, ridiculously expensive custom metrics.
- everfrustrated 2y agoEasily the best product in its category. The value is in APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a lot. If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using Splunk you can afford it. One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by seats so easy to open up for all of eng including product/QA teams and not just devs to use which is great for breaking down barriers. It's a bit like aws in that it's a platform - use of one product tends to encourage using more from their suite.
- hobs 2y agoWhich just meant that when the business had sticker shock they just disabled all the useful features of DD which consumed so much.
- xtracto 2y agoSecond this. I used to log large apps using kibana and elastic search. Also using the clusterfuck that are all AWS tries at this (cloud watch, log insights.amd whatnot). Nothing compares to what DD give you in observability. Having said that, DD should only be an AWS feature. They should buy them for a couple of billions and integrate it as a service for all of AWS infrastructure.
- acaloiar 2y agoThe clock begins counting down to Datadog figuring out how to charge per node, cpu, container, RAM (KB), and unicode characters indexed.
- Too 2y agoIsn't this what they already do? Log pricing is per ingested GB and monitoring is charged per node.
- Hilift 2y agoThey have to though, right? If you look at the nonsense people generate in logs, it would be a war crime to not monetize that. 20% of the PB's of data is probably the same 2,100 UTF-16 characters of Windows event id 4624.
- hdjjhhvvhga 2y agoThey already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all these nice features are really worth that high prices.
- propter_hoc 2y ago> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round. Rhetorically, why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.
- bomewish 2y agoPractically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.
- maccard 2y agoIt’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation. If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.
- Rastonbury 2y agoYou're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?
- propter_hoc 2y agoIs that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically? Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds. So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events." But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.
- hackernoops 2y agoI integrated Quickwit into our o11y platform. It was great tech with lots of promise, and now it's dead. Yet another reason to never do business with Datahog.
- morelish 2y agoHow much did they get acquired for?
- seaghost 2y agoSqreen was a great product for startups. Unfortunately acquired by the Datadog. Product was never fully integrated into their offerings and there is no such alternative.
- Moutiix 2y agoHey I'm an engineer who worked at Sqreen and now Datadog. What kind of feature is still missing in Datadog ASM? To my knowledge everything is there except managing CSP and security headers now.
- gigatexal 2y agoCome on this is HN, the news / link aggregator of a VC: tell us how much the exit was in $$$ ;-)