Use OpenTelemetry

One mistake that’s easy to fall into when using Datadog or any other observability platform is using their proprietary integrations instead of OpenTelemetry.

You might think you’d never consider moving off of Datadog, or you’d always delegate your logging and traces to a SaaS provider.

I thought the same myself, but sometimes the math changes, especially with how much money Datadog costs.

So, if you’re in a situation where you can choose, use OpenTelemetry. You can still forward your data to Datadog, and if/when you need to switch providers, you can do it more easily.