A big shout out to the author Peter Offringa. He seems very knowledgeable in the sw space and has articles on many of the companies followed here - DDOG, ESTC, SMAR, AYX, MDB to name a few. He has two extremely well written articles on DDOG, and ESTC analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. At the end of his DDOG article, there is a discussion between me (I go by Kurt) and the author. I do not want to repeat everything here. He likes both but prefers ESTC slightly more. You are welcome to read and discuss.
Thanks Saul and all contributors here for the valuable insights you keep bringing. I continue to learn.
Texmex, Thanks for sharing the article! It helps to gain more insights as I have interests in both ESTC and DDOG ( Though am invested only in DDOG at this point).
I had posted about DDOG and ESTC some time back. It’s affirming to see how my thoughts on how easy it is to replace monitoring solutions resonates with this author’s thoughts as well who says…
“In terms of switching observability solutions, there is some friction, but I would call it low. I have swapped out monitoring tools a couple times at past companies at scale. The downside of such easy installation and deployment of modern observability solutions is that a team can run two observability solutions in parallel. They would watch both for a period and once they feel the replacement is stable, the team just removes the monitoring agents of the one getting replaced.”
In one of my earlier posts I has emphasized this…
“For me, the most important thing going forward is to keep an eye on how DDOG innovates, executes and support their customers. Else, this is perhaps the third time I repeat that: monitoring is not necessarily sticky and it would not be difficult at all to replace Datadog if a better option comes along. Which could be ESTC, who knows. For now my wager is on DDOG.”
Excellent thread… and yes, I agree, if you are interested in any of the names that Peter covers on softwarestackinvesting.com, you must must read his writeups. Peter is the best I have come across and its blogs are free.
I have question for people knowledgeable in this space
Would an ESTC customer, just because they have to put in some work and customize, be more sticky / likely to not switch compared to say a DDOG customer?
Ron,
The author explanation for low switching costs for observability solutions makes sense. He also asks to watch out for NEWR, and SPLK which now offer the 3 pillars of observability (metrics, logs and tracing). So, DDOG instead of seeing greenfield opportunities would be asked to go for bakeoffs in the coming months. Customer growth, retention, and revenue growth #s should tell who is winning. In fact it will be interested to think if there are any other leading indicators to know who is winning these bake offs.
Would an ESTC customer, just because they have to put in some work and customize, be more sticky / likely to not switch compared to say a DDOG customer?
Nilvest,
Author’s contention is that unlike DDOG, ESTC offers a programmable platform for everything - search, observability, security, endpoint. So, it has more developer mindshare. Developers can build on it and create custom solutions. So, they are more invested in it. Being open source they have a huge Elastic community. In fact there are monthly (now virtual) community events all around the world. Not sure if many of our other companies have this.
With DDOG it is more of a complete solution. It is a better, easier to use product and people are clearly buying the 3 pillars at a high rate. But it should still be easier to switch out of it than Elastic.