These challenges become especially pressing when a vendor’s pricing model no longer aligns with your budget or telemetry data volume. Organizations often stick with expensive solutions to avoid the risks and costs of migrating, but understanding the mechanics of vendor lock-in can help you make smarter decisions.
Let’s explore the key reasons behind vendor lock-in and how to overcome them effectively.
1. Proprietary Data Formats
Many observability tools use proprietary formats for metrics, traces, and logs. This creates roadblocks when exporting data or switching platforms. Migrating from tools that don’t support open standards, such as OpenTelemetry, often requires re-instrumenting your application and making sweeping changes to your infrastructure—a costly and error-prone process.
The Solution.
OpenTelemetry and its data format, OTLP, provide a unified way to collect and share telemetry data. With OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions, you can seamlessly merge data from various sources, including cloud vendors, Vercel, or Cloudflare, into a unified view. By embracing open standards, you not only enable portability but also enrich context by combining diverse telemetry streams.
2. Instrumentation Dependencies
Vendor-specific SDKs and agents often tie your application to a specific tool. In large, distributed systems, replacing these dependencies is time-consuming and risks introducing bugs or regressions.
The Solution.
OpenTelemetry’s ecosystem offers vendor-agnostic SDKs, APIs, and auto-instrumentation agents. Its flexible collector architecture scales effortlessly across different environments, from lightweight local setups to secure enterprise deployments. Changing vendors is as simple as updating the backend URL in the OpenTelemetry Collector configuration.
At Dash0, we’ve made OpenTelemetry adoption easier with:
- OTelBin: An open-source tool for configuring and visualizing OpenTelemetry Collectors, simplifying deployment and monitoring.
- Dash0 Operator for Kubernetes: A free, open-source operator, built on top of several OpenTelemetry libraries, that automates the collection of telemetry from applications running on Kubernetes, and the Kubernetes cluster itself. Since it exports the data it collects to OTLP, the Dash0 Operator works with any vendor that can ingest OpenTelemetry data.
With OpenTelemetry, you only need to deploy one agent—ever.
3. Dashboard and Visualization Lock-In
Dashboards are often tightly integrated into specific platforms, making them difficult to migrate. Rebuilding hundreds of custom dashboards, alerts, and queries from scratch can be a massive undertaking.
The Solution.
Perses, an open-source dashboarding tool, is designed to visualize observability data from multiple sources like Prometheus, Thanos, and Jaeger. As a CNCF project, Perses embraces community standards and offers:
- Dashboards-as-Code for easier maintenance.
- GitOps-friendly validation for CI/CD workflows.
- Extensibility through plugins for reuse across projects.
- Kubernetes-native features to simplify deployments as CRDs.
Dash0’s dashboards are based on Perses, allowing you to deploy them alongside your code or export and import configurations directly from the UI. And if you decide that Dash0 is not the observability tool for you, bring your dashboards along as you move on!
Dashboard with Source Tab to copy/paste Perses JSON.
4. Alerting Lock-In
Alerts, similar to dashboards, are closely tied to the observability platform in use. Hundreds or thousands of alerts may need to be migrated, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone manual process. Most tools only allow alerts to be defined in the UI.
The Solution.
Dash0 treats Prometheus Alerts as first-class entities with full support for deploying them as code. This enables the reuse of existing PromQL-based alerts and easy migration to any platform that supports this standard format. The alerts are incorporated into the code and CI/CD pipeline, ensuring they are updated and maintained with each release.
This approach also facilitates the utilization of community-driven alerts, such as those found in the Awesome Prometheus Alerts project. By leveraging these alerts, organizations can benefit from the collective knowledge and experience of the Prometheus community.
Creating a new alert based on hundreds of awesome Prometheus alerts.
5. Query Language Incompatibility
Proprietary query languages create steep learning curves and limit interoperability. Switching to a new tool often disrupts workflows as teams must adapt to unfamiliar syntax and features.
The Solution.
Dash0 uses PromQL, the widely adopted query language for metrics. This ensures compatibility with tools like Prometheus and reusable community resources and documentation. We found clever ways of using it to query traces and logs as if they were metrics, ensuring that you need just one query language to access all the functionality of Dash0.
For users new to PromQL, Dash0 also offers a visual query builder that guides you through selecting metrics or services, making query creation intuitive and seamless.
Easy-to-use query builder.
6. Long-Term Contracts and Pricing Models
Vendors often push for multi-year contracts, and pricing models based on data volume that can lead to unpredictable costs. Without visibility into which services or environments are driving expenses, managing telemetry budgets becomes a headache.
The Solution.
Dash0’s pricing model is simple and transparent. Our subscription is monthly, so you can move on whenever you decide it is the right time. Costs are based on the volume of telemetry data ingested, and using OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions, users can break down costs by dimensions such as service, team, or environment. Dashboards provide real-time cost visibility, ensuring no surprises.
Cost for spans broken down and forecasted by service.
7. Training and Learning Curve
Learning a tool’s interface, query language, and features takes time. Switching to a new tool often disrupts team productivity as members must retrain.
The Solution.
Dash0 is built on open standards like OpenTelemetry, PromQL, and Perses, so existing knowledge of Prometheus or Jaeger translates directly. We offer comprehensive documentation, free training, and videos to help teams onboard quickly.
Additionally, Dash0 integrates AI-driven assistance for PromQL. By clicking the “Explain” button on any query, users can get a natural-language breakdown of the query, making it easier to understand and use.
PromQL Insights explaining a PromQL statement to the user.
Dash0: Zero Lock-In, Maximum Flexibility
By building on CNCF standards and prioritizing interoperability, Dash0 provides a flexible, future-proof observability platform. With Dash0, you get:
- OpenTelemetry-native data collection.
- PromQL-based queries with visual aids.
- Perses-based dashboards for easy sharing and reuse.
- Transparent pricing with real-time cost tracking.
Say goodbye to vendor lock-in, unexpected costs, and retraining hassles. With Dash0, you can focus on what matters—building better, more resilient applications.
Ready to experience observability without boundaries? Get started with Dash0 today!
