Underdog

We had a nice dinner with an old friend who works on a big project with around 25 engineers on the one-person framework. As a two-person team, we were impressed and had a lot of questions. At some point, we eventually started talking about monitoring. They use Datadog, and he generously offered to give us a tour and some interesting insights:

• It took their team about one week to configure Datadog and all its instrumentations.
• They hired a famous Rails performances consultant, who regularly praises Datadog, to help them make sense of it.
• Being one of the happy few who configured Datadog in the first place, it took our friend a while to show us the countless screens and find what was problematic in his application.
• About 5 in 25 developers on their team understand it and use it.
• They only monitored a 1% sample of their requests to limit the expenses. Still, Datadog costs them a developer salary, and you need an MBA to understand how its pricing works.

Of course, Datadog has more to offer than our modest product. Everyone and his dog know them, and we are not on the stock market exchange.

We’re certainly not in the same league, but in comparison:

• It barely takes 2 minutes to install RoRvsWild: Add a Gem, deploy.
• RoRvsWild is so simple everybody can understand what is slow or broken, even non-developers. We believe the vast majority of Rails teams are small and don’t have engineers entirely dedicated to performance and reliability.
• RoRvsWild shows you what’s problematic in the least amount of time, so you keep your time to do what you love.
• RoRvsWild collects less but enough data for most needs and to keep the costs low by default. It is by far the least expensive monitoring tool.

After this demo, we are more convinced than ever that we already better align with the needs of a small team of Ruby on Rails developers, and we have some plans to make it more obvious.

It resonates with Jason Fried’s post: “We stand with the Underdogs”.

To make up for what you don’t have with something they can’t have: The underdog spirit.

Datadog is not alone, there are plenty of big dogs in the APM space. We like to be small, and to be able to do what we want.

When we started, we were asked what animal represented our logo. We had no idea at the time. Yaro answered this question for us: it’s a wild boar! 🐗 Wild boars eventually get quite big. When we grow up, if we do, we want to to stay wild.