Anyone here using Datadog?

It’s a wonderful tool, that quickly can become expensive. My client approached me to reduce our logging costs by removing unnecessary sources. The company was feeding logs to datadog from almost every source.

Costs were horrible. Consider 5 TBs of logs. No, not monthly. Daily. That gives roughly 150 TB / month, 1.8 PB a year. Petabytes.

For those who like mathematical notation it’s:

1.8 PB = 1.8 * 10^3 TB = 1.8 * 10^6 GiB = 1.8 * 10^9 MB

So, we’d need roughly 1.25 billion floppy disks (remember those?) every year to store it. Aligned next to each other, they’d create a road about 3,000 km long — roughly the distance from Poland to Barcelona and back. That’s roughly 8,000 standard 256 GiB SSDs — every year. That’s around 600 million iPhone photos — one photo per second for 19 years straight. Or 383,000 DVD discs. Stack them on top of each other and you’d get a tower almost 460 meters high — about 1.5× the Eiffel Tower, and slightly higher than the Empire State Building. Not quite Burj Khalifa yet, but… give them two years. That’s also about 900,000 VHS tapes — or five fully packed TIR trucks.