[HN Gopher] DRUIDS: Datadog Reusable User Interface Design System
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DRUIDS: Datadog Reusable User Interface Design System
Author : fabianh001
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-09-20 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (druids.datadoghq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (druids.datadoghq.com)
| worldmerge wrote:
| Wish I could use this
| smokoco wrote:
| nice
| rajveermalviya wrote:
| > DRUIDS is not an open source design system. These guidelines
| are specifically for internal Datadog users. [1]
|
| even npm package[2] asks for login
|
| [1] https://druids.datadoghq.com/foundations/contribute
|
| [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@druids/ui
| leangeek wrote:
| Key factor here that people should know.
| solardev wrote:
| Awwwwwwwwwwww... that makes me SO sad. I LOVE Datadog's
| dashboards and UI and was so excited that they opened it up.
| Finally some competition for MUI, I thought, but nope :(
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Finally some competition for MUI, I thought
|
| NPM is full of every other company's internal component
| library they open source/release publicly. Datadog would have
| been nothing special.
| bagels wrote:
| I don't know why they couldn't put a friendly version of that
| message on the landing page.
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| Are people outside the org even meant to see the page? That
| is odd.
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| Well there is a ref=hackernews in the URL for tracking so I
| guess yes ?
| antoineMoPa wrote:
| Is this the same Datadog that sends spam calls to developers
| after office hours to sell their tools?
| marcrosoft wrote:
| Their billing practices aren't great either. Non transparent
| pricing, requiring docusign after signup to change plans, and
| no refunds for unused services.
| MrDOS wrote:
| Not to mention that, by default, they bill by the whole
| calendar month for each infrastructure and APM host. Scale
| your Kubernetes cluster up and then back down? That'll be an
| extra $18 + $36 per additional node (not $15 + $31 - that's
| the contract pricing, not the on-demand pricing), even if
| they were only online for a few days - even if they were only
| online for thirty seconds. Swap out a node? By default they
| bill by _unique_ instances, not by _number_ of instances, so
| they 'll bill you for that, too.
|
| If you ask them about it, they'll "happily" put you onto
| hourly on-demand billing (which seems to fix the unique vs.
| count thing, too), which _is_ more expensive if you let
| something run on-demand for a whole month... but isn 't the
| point of an on-demand service that you're _not_ running it
| for a whole billing period?
|
| Also, their agent logs fairly noisily, and of course its logs
| count toward your quota! I upgraded a cluster without also
| upgrading the agent, and didn't notice for about a week that
| each agent was happily spamming away about some long-
| deprecated Kubernetes API no longer being available[0]. At
| $2.55/million log lines and fewer than a million lines
| logged, this was not a costly mistake, but it's the principle
| of the thing. Why should an incompatibility in _their_ agent
| (which their dashboard could specifically alert about, but
| doesn 't!) cost _me_ money?
|
| [0] https://github.com/DataDog/helm-
| charts/issues/620#issuecomme...
| bdcravens wrote:
| Their billing doesn't match up with AWS's (AWS is by the
| second, Datadog by the hour, or at least when we used it)
| even though it's by the cloud instance (doesn't roll over).
| So we ended up paying more for the monitoring than the actual
| resources being monitored. When we asked for a break, they
| agreed to give us a 50% break IF we signed up for additional
| services.
| j_kao wrote:
| How does one go about removing a phone number off of these
| sales data aggregators?
|
| I don't think I've ever explicitly given these phone numbers to
| tools like this (e.g. signing up to Datadog with a phone
| number), so this seems like sensitive PII that must have been
| leaked and scraped in some shady source that these sales "data-
| enrichment" tools happily take.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| There are probably way too many data aggregators out there to
| keep track of completely, but theres definitely a few github
| repos I've seen that keep lists of both the companies and
| their opt-out procedures (some with automation).
|
| This is one of the better ones I've seen:
| https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-
| Li...
|
| From a purely B2B perspective, the most egregious offender
| IMHO is Zoominfo largely because of the wide adoption in
| sales orgs. You can opt-out here:
| https://www.zoominfo.com/privacy-center/update/remove
| brianwawok wrote:
| Change your number and only leak to IRL contacts.
|
| Optionally have your work provide you a work phone and only
| give that out for work activities.
| _b0t wrote:
| I'll never use Datadog for this reason. I have been pestered by
| so many salesmen _relentlessly_, even after saying I was not
| interested.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Also the same Datadog that in order to give us a price break
| due to a misconfiguration, strong-armed us into signing up for
| additional monitoring.
| gilbetron wrote:
| What kind of monitoring did they strong-arm you into? How did
| they strong arm? Genuine questions!
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's been long enough that I'd have to dig up the emails.
| May have been RUM, uncertain. Bottom line is we have never
| been treated that way by any other company. No matter how
| many podcasts they put ads on or events they sponsor at
| conferences, they are the tech equivalent of used cars
| salesmen; they are not friends of developers.
| EwanToo wrote:
| Yes, their sales team is far too aggressive, I can't imagine
| it's successful for building their brand with developers
| Linell wrote:
| I too have had more spam calls from Datadog than any other tech
| company. Their product seems great but after what feels like
| harassment, I've never wanted to give them my money.
| sumofproducts wrote:
| As someone allergic to those stupid cold calls, this is real
| disappointing to hear--I hadn't been exposed, presumably
| because I'm already a customer and have been for years.
|
| As much as I love the product, I'll have to reconsider my
| usage of Datadog in future projects.
| scop wrote:
| Yup. I find their sales strategy deplorable as not only do they
| cold call like crazy, but their presence at conferences are all
| sales and no meat.
|
| For example early on in AWS Lambda's life, DataDog was hosting
| a session at reInvent that looked like a semi-advanced dive
| into the new technology. Awesome! I was legitimately excited
| and thought this might be one of the better sessions of the
| conference. I show up only to find it is 30 minutes of _stand
| up comedy_ , 10 minutes of the most basic "how to create a
| lambda function" tutorial (probably ripped right from Jeff
| Barr's blog), and 15 minutes of "you should buy DataDog".
|
| To this day, we use "DataDog" as in team meetings as a term to
| communicate shadiness etc.
|
| (Edited to fix typo on Barr's name)
| weldedtogether wrote:
| Besides the product itself, I can appreciate the lengths gone to
| make DRUIDS work as an acronym, and the more fun UI/logo elements
| present.
| philsnow wrote:
| Datadog's product is a bit too close to Apache Druid to have
| named their design system so similarly.
|
| From https://druid.apache.org/ :
|
| > Druid unlocks new types of queries and workflows for
| clickstream, APM, supply chain, network telemetry, digital
| marketing, risk/fraud, and many other types of data. Druid is
| purpose built for rapid, ad-hoc queries on both real-time and
| historical data.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I was JUST thinking of building a small web app for viewing local
| structured JSON logs with a subset of the features in the Datadog
| logs explorer. It'd be a nice little bonus to build the UI with
| the same components!
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Say what you want about Datadog's pricing and sales tactics...
| the product is a joy to use.
| sv123 wrote:
| I love searching and faceting in the logs and building quick
| charts off of measures within the results... so easy to find
| things and drill into problems.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| When it works, it is awesome.
|
| But there are some caveats. Facets can break in unexpected ways
| and the last time you want to be dealing with this is when
| you're dealing with a fire in production.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| When my team was forced to use it a few years ago it was order
| of magnitude more expensive than diy prometheus/grafana while
| being less friendly to devs - their metric query language
| absolutely sucked. Was more friendly to non-devs who liked
| pretty ui tho...
|
| We also had some collector troubles and support basically did
| nothing but wasted our time in calls repeatedly
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Managed services are always more expensive than DIY FWIW.
| You're paying to make running the product someone else's
| problem.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| We were not at a scale where you would want to hire
| dedicated observability expert but with their pricing it
| totally made sense. My guess is their play is to get in
| early and get you locked in gud
| idoco wrote:
| That is why DIY is usually more expensive than managed
| services. Engineering hours are expensive and best spent on
| your core competencies.
|
| DIY only make sense at a very small scale or very large
| scale, everything in between is usually best offloaded to
| those which do it as their core competency.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I would caution against sweeping generalizations like
| that. In this case "diy" part is basically just
| configuration management which with dd you will have to
| do anyway. And sure they make it slightly easier by
| providing defaults for most things but Prometheus/grafana
| do a decent job at it too.
|
| More broadly I've never used managed service that would
| "just work" and wouldn't require substantial
| configuration and often times bunch of workarounds but
| maybe those exist
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why does DIY make sense at very small scale IYO?
|
| It seems like very small scale has the highest leverage
| of utility-priced services (and often fits into free
| tiers of many).
| Wilya wrote:
| At every single org I've been where Datadog has been
| considered, the conclusion has been "Yes, it would be
| cool, but we really can't justify the price."
|
| Yes, in theory, in the middle scale, you should outsource
| things, but in practice, it only works if the managed
| service is at the right price.
| bdcravens wrote:
| They have a good product, but no matter how good it is, after
| the experience I had with their sales, I will never use the
| service again.
| manfre wrote:
| They're overly aggressive and the cold calls to my personal
| cell mean I'll avoid their product whenever I'm in a decision
| making role.
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| their sales is abysmal. i have a new account manager every 6
| months that wants to schedule a meeting. they put stuff on
| proposed contracts where they don't even offer a discount.
|
| just terrible.
|
| imo they should drastically simplify their billing dimensions
| so a simple human can understand it. for a certain size of
| company it just makes no sense to need to be engaged with a
| sales teams.
| n0t3ths81 wrote:
| would you mind elaborating a little bit on what happened?
| bena wrote:
| Not only do they cold call people's personal phones, they
| do it after being told no. In all of their communication,
| they are pushy and give off used car salesman vibes.
| azemetre wrote:
| I have no experience with sales but I always wonder what
| kind of incentives these people are given to take such
| draconian measures. Are they acting like stalkers because
| they get a fat commission check or is it typically do to
| something else?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| They need to meet a quota. But also commission paid.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Signed up for their service to get visibility into our
| infrastructure; we're a small company with a big setup.
| They bill hourly, but we do a lot of small instances that
| run for a few minutes at a time. Twelve instances running 3
| minutes each is billed as 12 hours of monitoring.
|
| We approached them to see if they would work with us on
| reducing the massive bill that resulted. They agreed to cut
| it by 50% if we signed up for additional services. I'm not
| talking about a future volume discount; we were working
| with them for a good faith credit once we discovered the
| mismatch with their billing model (we had already filtered
| out those instance types)
|
| Objectively, we owed the money. However, every other vendor
| I've run into works with small companies like ours without
| resorting to those kinds of tactics, so it's a pretty
| terrible look for them.
| codegeek wrote:
| Agreed. I had the same experience though as many others when it
| comes to Sales. I understand it is a complex product but they
| couldn't demo me anything even after 2 meetings. They wanted a
| 3rd meeting for the demo even though I made it clear on the 1st
| meeting that I am only interested in specific products (log
| monitoring etc) and would be good to see a demo in 2nd meeting.
|
| Too much friction in their sales process. But I guess I am not
| the target audience.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Re: not target audience -- I think you're right, I am also
| part of that cohort (speaking as an engineer at least).
|
| This is one of the reasons why I steer away from anything
| that requires a demo. If an org can't present even a read-
| only interactive version of the product, then it likely means
| that there is a KPI/OKR-heavy pitch intended for management
| or non-engineering business stakeholders to hear (of which
| the upselling you alluded to is a part).
|
| The majority of the (F)OSS alternatives out there can be
| demo'ed with little-to-no engineering lift from prospective
| users. This is meaningful for the adoption story because it
| creates bottom-up pressure to internally pitch to relevant
| stakeholders-- a much more powerful tool than external
| pitches. The fact that Datadog seems either unwilling or
| incapable of doing this historically, while touting one of
| the more expensive products in that particular vertical,
| suggests that the product value-add may not speak for itself
| (at least to a significant subset of engineers).
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Are you kidding? It's visual vomit and takes 3-4 clicks to get
| to relevant data. The only "great" thing about it could be the
| tracing but something you can easily get with
| OpenTracing/Jaeger. I have to use Datadog daily and sorely miss
| Grafana.
| yevpats wrote:
| I always wonder why you need a design system for a dev first
| product. MaterialUI + theme palette would be enough most probably
| but I guess its the (soon to be over) age of free money.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I cannot wait for material ui to die and go by the wayside
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| It's fine for what it is - a batteries included component
| library. Not a lot of the current ones come close. Maybe
| Mantine or Semantic but there's not a lot of _great_ ones out
| there.
| vosper wrote:
| I hear you on "don't build your own design system"... but
| Datadog's got a really complex UI, I think they've definitely
| graduated past the point where something like MUI would be a
| good choice (and obviously they have the resources to do an
| internal design system, and do it well).
|
| For Datadog I think it makes sense.
| wzy wrote:
| Material UI... in 2022? Why not just return to Bootstrap?
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| what's wrong with material UI? it's fine for people building
| admin panels, ERP and what not AKA real apps, not websites.
| What would you use instead?
| markeibes wrote:
| Literally anything. Unstyled HTML tags are better
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Datadog is the Monster cable company of data analytics
| zomglings wrote:
| WOW.
|
| This is some of the best documentation I have ever seen, and a
| very elegant design, too.
|
| WOW.
|
| I am working on documentation for my own product right now, and
| this is inspiring.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I'm curious, what is it that drives every tech company to
| eventually publish a UI framework? I get the value of having an
| internal UI framework which allows anyone in an organisation to
| quickly throw something together which is at least vaguely in
| line with branding and UI patterns, but what value do they get
| from then making that available to the general public. Surely it
| just puts a burden on the maintainers because they can no longer
| just send a quick email or Slack message to the relevant channel
| saying "we're going to break backwards compatibility for widget
| X, make sure you update".
| nijave wrote:
| One place I worked did that because it made
| development/packaging easier. You didn't need to maintain a
| private repo with auth for something that eventually gets
| published publicly anyway
| ctvo wrote:
| > I'm curious, what is it that drives every tech company to
| eventually publish a UI framework? I get the value of having an
| internal UI framework which allows anyone in an organisation to
| quickly throw something together which is at least vaguely in
| line with branding and UI patterns, but what value do they get
| from then making that available to the general public.
|
| It makes their front-end engineers and designers happy and acts
| as a recruiting tool: Look at what we're building for internal
| use and our culture of open source contributions.
|
| > Surely it just puts a burden on the maintainers because they
| can no longer just send a quick email or Slack message to the
| relevant channel saying "we're going to break backwards
| compatibility for widget X, make sure you update".
|
| It sometimes does, if they bother to support public issues vs.
| it being available but mostly only supporting internal use
| cases.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Some people might call it "busywork"
| justinzollars wrote:
| cool brand name.
| Dowwie wrote:
| I tried out this design system but got a bill for $125,000 for
| scrolling charges
| afandian wrote:
| Context?
| vosper wrote:
| It's really easy to run up a huge bill from Datadog if, for
| example, some engineer adds a whole lot of new
| tags/dimensions to metrics data because they think it would
| be useful to have in the future (full disclosure: that was
| me, in a previous role. I think I "spent" almost $30k on
| extra metrics before anyone realised and we tracked down what
| happened - I was new to DD and didn't even know they charged
| extra for those things)
| fabianh001 wrote:
| DRUIDS is the design system for Datadog. It stands for "Datadog
| Reusable User Interface Design System."
| jungturk wrote:
| Datadog is an application monitoring suite (distributed trace,
| log aggregation, infrastructure instrumentation, dashboarding)
| that includes a web-based front-end which makes use of these
| components.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Your explanation assumes people know what Datadog is, or that
| what that is could somehow be easily inferred from the name ...
| seneca wrote:
| It's one of the most prominent vendors in the tech space.
| It's pretty safe to assume people know who Datadog is on a
| software forum. Not always well loved, but definitely well
| known.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I know who they are only because I googled them while
| reading this thread. There are a _lot_ of software
| developers who don 't deploy software via the cloud, so
| would have zero use for "Cloud Monitoring as a service"
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Absolutely not. In 20 years I've heard the name twice: Once
| six weeks ago when they emailed me to try to get my team to
| use their tools (which they failed to describe to me, so I
| declined), and a second time just now on HN.
|
| I don't know who they are or what they do. I asked my
| coworkers - they didn't know either.
|
| "Everybody knows about x" where x is any proper noun in the
| software space is frequently a bad bet. The software world
| is exceedingly large, and people are familiar with chunks
| of it.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| ...I'm really struggling to understand why you
| can't/won't figure out what DataDog does the same way any
| of us figures out what anything does; by Googling it.
|
| You asked your coworkers! That demonstrates an interest,
| why wouldn't you ask Google?
| ThePadawan wrote:
| > Absolutely not. In 20 years I've heard the name twice:
| Once six weeks ago when they emailed me to try to get my
| team to use their tools (which they failed to describe to
| me, so I declined), and a second time just now on HN.
|
| I want to second this - today is the second time I heard
| of them. The first was a job offer on LinkedIn that also
| failed to describe what Datadog did. It did talk a lot
| about how it was enterprise scale and important, though.
|
| I declined to look further into it.
| seneca wrote:
| There are always people who are out of touch with the
| current market (and I don't mean that condescendingly.
| There's not much value in knowing these things for many
| people in the space). That doesn't mean things they
| aren't aware of aren't well known. Of course not everyone
| knows, but a critical mass certainly does such that it's
| not really necessary to introduce the company every time
| it's discussed.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Well, it was only founded in 2010. So it's been less than
| 12 years in existence.
|
| And one of the better known vendors in monitoring
| services.
| midislack wrote:
| Never heard of it, if you're not a webshitter there's about
| a 0% chance you'd ever know who or what it is.
| chainwax wrote:
| Isn't DRUIDS a reference to something? I swear I remember it
| being from a TV show, but I can't quite remember.
| azemetre wrote:
| Druid is a religious term but nowadays most commonly used in
| fantasy fiction, don't know it's first written usage. It is a
| term that has been around since ancient Roman times.
| Particularly England with the Wicca religions.
|
| Imagine a forest dwelling witch (in very basic terms).
| duiker101 wrote:
| OK, I am not one for complaining about designs, and I'm not even
| going to say this is bad.
|
| But for some reason, I can't even look at the page. It's giving
| me a headache, just a few seconds of looking at it makes me
| feel... very off. Almost feel like I'm staring at an optical
| illusion. Super weird.
| lelo_tp wrote:
| Really awesome work on the "examples" section. As someone
| personally working on a design system docs, I admire the team's
| thoughtfulness on building that
| pdntspa wrote:
| I can really appreciate the weirdness of the aesthetic in an age
| where every startup has to make everything cute and fashionable
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm really curious what kind of UX riddle this "Mystery of the
| DRUIDS" everyone keeps talking about is.
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