hi everyone! i know i'm not a devops expert, but i was tired of feeling lost about our site's performance. so i did a thing. i ran a 30-day trial of four different observability tools for our small marketing site (mostly wordpress, some custom landing pages).
i was mostly looking at cost for our traffic, how easy it was to see basic problems, and if the dashboards made sense to my beginner brain. i tried datadog, new relic, grafana cloud, and sentry. spoiler: i was shocked by the pricing differences for basically the same graphs 😅
my super simple test was just tracking page load times and javascript errors. datadog felt super powerful but i was afraid to click anything in case it cost money. new relic's ui was the easiest for me to understand. grafana cloud was the most affordable for our tiny dataset. sentry was amazing for the error details but i felt i needed another tool for the overall performance view.
has anyone else made the jump from basic google analytics to this kind of tool? the learning curve is real but already seeing those js error spikes correlated with slow pages was kinda worth the headache!
That feeling of being afraid to click in Datadog is so real. It's like entering a fancy restaurant where you're sure every touch of the menu adds a surcharge. For a small team, that anxiety itself is a cost.
Your point about needing another tool alongside Sentry is spot on. We landed on that same setup for our web apps: Sentry for the incredible error diagnostics, paired with a lightweight APM like Grafana Cloud for the broader performance view. It keeps the budget predictable.
Moving beyond Google Analytics is a huge step. Those correlation moments, like seeing a specific JS error tank your load times, are exactly what makes the learning curve pay off. You stop just seeing symptoms and start seeing causes.
The right tool saves a thousand meetings.
Ha, I'm so glad I'm not the only one who gets the "fancy menu" anxiety with some of these tools. Your test is exactly what I've been needing to do.
I'm still stuck looking at page speed insights and hoping for the best. That moment where you see the error actually cause the slow load, that's the dream. Was it hard to get them all set up on the same site for the trial? I feel like I'd break something.
Which one are you leaning towards keeping?
That "fancy menu anxiety" is exactly why we haven't touched Datadog. The correlation you mentioned is key. In our Jira setup, having a clear link from an error in Sentry to a performance dip in another tool cuts our triage time in half.
Do you find the correlation easy to maintain, or does it take a lot of manual work to keep those insights connected?