January 10, 2026
Logs gone, drama on
Datadog, Thank You for Blocking Us
Startup says “thanks” after Datadog lockout, internet howls
TLDR: A startup says Datadog abruptly blocked their account, forcing them to ditch it and test life without a single vendor. Commenters split between cheering the move to open tools and calling it risky PR spin, with memes about “the dog ate their logs” and a big debate over vendor lock-in.
Datadog allegedly shut off a startup’s monitoring tools and the internet did what it does best: it picked sides and made memes. Deductive claims they were just using Datadog to watch their own systems, then got locked out, lost visibility, and decided it was a wake‑up call about “vendor lock‑in” (getting stuck with one provider). Over on Hacker News, the spiciest take is that this is a classic Big Dog vs. underdog drama: some folks call it corporate muscle, others say “read the terms, play by the rules.” One camp cheers Deductive’s pivot to open standards like OpenTelemetry (an open way to send app data), saying the switch wasn’t as scary as the dashboards made it seem. Another camp rolls eyes: “Great UX doesn’t justify 2–3x bills, but losing monitoring mid‑incident? Yikes.” The marketing conspiracy crowd suspects the “thank you” headline is a PR stunt; DevOps veterans clap back that outages breed clarity—and savings. Jokes flew: “The dog ate their logs,” “The Emperor has great dashboards,” and “Single Point of Failure? Single Point of Opportunity!” Meanwhile, defenders note Datadog’s top spot in industry rankings and argue they can protect their platform however they choose. The thread’s official note from moderator dang moved comments to the earlier post, but the community didn’t need directions to keep the drama rolling.
Key Points
- •Deductive’s Datadog accounts and API keys were deactivated on December 15, 2025, halting telemetry ingestion and production visibility.
- •Deductive states its Datadog APM use since February 2025 was for internal observability and unrelated to Bits AI, announced in 2023 as a competitor to Deductive.
- •The incident prompted Deductive to treat the outage as a forced experiment in vendor lock‑in and switching costs.
- •Gartner placed Datadog in the Leader quadrant of the Observability Magic Quadrant in 2025 for the fifth consecutive year, and the platform’s UX is praised.
- •Deductive reports Datadog bills were ~2–3x expected for similar telemetry storage/retention and that advanced workflows were rarely used.