Summary

Charity Majors uses Mat Duggan's viral post about ClickHouse to make a broader point: columnar storage-backed observability ('Observability 2.0') is architecturally superior to the three-pillars model, and Honeycomb has been saying so for a decade. Her real frustration is that newer vendors built on columnar stores are squandering their architectural advantage by marketing themselves as 'Datadog, but cheaper' instead of as a fundamentally different class of tool.

Key Insight

The observability industry's dirty secret is that most newer vendors built on superior columnar architecture are voluntarily lobotomizing their products to compete on price, while the real opportunity — and the one Honeycomb has pursued for a decade — is competing on fundamentally better architecture that enables a different class of product.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 10

  Because it isn't just fucking Clickhouse, you numbnuts.

• 7

  The weakness I sense in Datadog is all product.

• 7

  Lower price is a consequence of better architecture, and honestly, it's one of the least interesting consequences.

• 5

  One powerful, context rich data set is worth more than the sum of its pillars, because relationships are what makes data valuable.

• 9

  They are doing this because the weakness that they sense in Datadog is all price. The weakness I sense in Datadog is all product.

Tone

passionate, vindicated, critical