It's interesting that you're using both Honeycomb and Datadog. With everything migrated to OTel, would there be advantages to consolidating on just Honeycomb (or Datadog)? Have you found they're useful for different things, or is there enough overlap that you could use just one or the other?
Author here, thanks for the question! The current split developed from the personal preferences of the engineers who initially set up our observability systems, based on what they had used (and liked) at previous jobs.
We're definitely open to doing more consolidation in the future, especially if we can save money by doing that, but from a usability standpoint we've been pretty happy with Honeycomb for traces and Datadog for everything else so far. And, that seems to be aligned with what each vendor is best at at the moment.
Am I wrong to say... having 2 is "expensive"? Maybe not if 50% of your stuff is going to Honeycomb and 50% going to DataDog. Could you save money/complexity (less places to look for things) having just DataDog or just Honeycomb?
Right now, there isn't much duplication of what we're sending to each vendor, so I don't think we'd save a ton by consolidating, at least based on list prices. We could maybe negotiate better prices based on higher volumes, but I'm not sure if Airplane is spending enough at this point to get massive discounts there.
Another potential benefit would definitely be reduced complexity and better integration for the engineering team. So, for instance, you could look at a log and then more easily navigate to the UI for the associated trace. Currently, we do this by putting Honeycomb URLs in our Datadog log events, which works but isn't quite as seamless. But, given that our team is pretty small at this point and that we're not spending a ton of our time on performance optimizations, we don't feel an urgent need to consolidate (yet).
