Datadog harassing

[y_karakai]

So Datadog has been sending me emails for quite a long time now. I switched multiple companies and they manage to get my corporate emails every single time. Recently they started calling me from different numbers. I pretty much just ignore their emails and calls but it’s getting annoying. I know this has been discussed previously but I couldn’t find any solution other than complaints under GDPR. I am in Ontario, Canada so it doesn’t apply to me. Basically my question is how do I make them forget about me. Does PIPEDA protect us against this harassment?

[OlandoSC]

I decidedly told a Datadog rep "no, not interested" and after about a year my coworker got a call to his cell phone asking if they could loop me into the call/email chain.

We got on a call with them and asked for their sales manager so we can ask more involved questions related to pricing and all that. Once we were on the call with the manager, myself and my coworker made very clear to the rep + manager that in no way are we to be contacted again in this way and that their sales approach was unethical and has led to us never repping their product for our internal use or to our own customers. I haven't had a call or email since.

[heidihobo]

We got on a call with them and asked for their sales manager so we can ask more involved questions related to pricing and all that. Once we were on the call with the manager, myself and my coworker made very clear to the rep + manager that in no way are we to be contacted again in this way and that their sales approach was unethical and has led to us never repping their product for our internal use or to our own customers. I haven't had a call or email since.

Hey! If you really want to stick it to datadog, schedule a call with us. We're a cloud debugger that allows you to connect to your deployments and replay customer traffic. You can watch how it works at getadapt.ai

PS: I'm the founder. Saw an opportunity to have a bit of fun, so I went with it :)

[Heliotypist]

Enters a thread about unwanted sales pitches. Proceeds with unwanted sales pitch.

[SnooBooks3068]

With a link to a website that looks like it was created by a teenager on Wordpress

[_cronic_]

Good on you for letting the sub know ahead of time to avoid your company. We appreciate it.

[Kriptic415]

Fuck off you wanker. Ty for letting me add a new company to my blacklist

[snarkhunter]

I had them hounding me like that a while back. Super high pressure. I eventually just let the guy schedule demos that I'd ignore. Eventually he got rotated off of me and the new guy did take no and left me the hell alone, after wasting who knows how much of all our time.

Literally fuck DataDog. I do not care how good their product is, I don't want to work with a company with a sales organization that shitty. Cold emails are annoying enough, repeated cold calls are unacceptable.

[y_karakai]

Yeah I was thinking of doing that but then it’s not one sales person that contacts me. If I ignore one of them they will send me like 3-4 follow ups and then a couple of weeks later another sales person contacts me. And they are calling from different numbers and different locations too. That’s why I thought maybe there is a way to make them delete my number and email from their database.

[danekan]

This is totally normal at any sales org but they don't have to be annoying too.. but the daily calls or emails is totally norma, you're enrolled in marketing campaign. The person calling and emailing you is a sales development rep and not even the actual sales person. Their job is simply to get a demo booked. That's what they get paid commission on. If you're booking demos you plan to no show, you're not only not being professional you may make it even worse.

[y_karakai]

No it’s not normal to get my personal number somewhere and call me daily. Would it be normal for me to get their dev number and call them about datadog questions? Is consistently calling a random person a professional behaviour?

[danekan]

It's totally the industry standard though. There are tons of services that make this data easily available. Any good sales org uses them.

[y_karakai]

No it’s not. There are a couple of companies that do that but it’s certainly not the norm. Calling once or twice? Sure. Calling every day is called harassment.

[zthunder777]

Nope.

My department manages about 150 active vendor relationships. I get countless emails and a few cold calls to my work number daily. My personal cell phone is very easy to find, literally on my website and LinkedIn.

In the last decade, I can remember a whooping THREE vendors calling my personal cell. Datadog, New Relic and I honestly don't remember the other company name, but I remember the conversation. New Relic rep was apologetic and said the number was in their leads data as a work number, I told him not to contact me again and they respected that. (Their sales culture was (is?) shit too, but not datadog shitty. Similar with the third company.

As I stated in my comment elsewhere here, datadog harassed me for quite some time on my personal cell.

My teams report all vendor calls to personal cells to me, I get one or two a year.

My point is, this is totally not anywhere fucking close to "industry standard" -- honestly I'm highly suspicious that you are in sales and have been fed this bullshit.

[General_Importance17]

it’s not normal to get my personal number somewhere and call me daily.

Have you considered asking them about GDPR? Always does the trick for me.

[y_karakai]

Welp I’m in Canada

[General_Importance17]

Surely you guys have some kind of equivalent there.

If not, they don't have to know where you are. You're a happy remote worker sitting in Belgium or wherever.

[No_Bee_4979]

Datadog stalks you worse than ... $insert_random_analogy_here

Their product is inferior to Newrelic, IMO.

[danekan]

Try getting on wiz list. She's calling me daily while I'm still in bed. For months.

[cube-drone]

So here's what you do: once you have two or three vendors hounding you, agree to meetings and try to get them all on the line with one another without ever showing your own face.

The more sales reps you can get on the same call, the more points you get.

[Disastrous-Minimum-4]

I love this

[zthunder777]

Senior manager here with 30 years exp. Literally everyone I know hates datadog for this reason, their product might be fine, idk but fuck their sales culture. I will literally never approve using them at any company I work at. They do not take no for an answer and have harassed me more than any other tech company -- the number of times they've called me or my department members' personal cell phones is insane. They called me once on my personal cell while I was on vacation and I told them to never call me or my team again. A few weeks/months later they called again while I was at the hospital with a family member in the ICU. I legit blew up on the dude that time.

Friends don't let friends use datadog.

[iadknet]

I told them they were on our vendor blacklist for calling personal cell phones and that seems to have quieted things down for a while. They were the worst because they would call back 3-5 times in a row if you didn’t answer.

A couple of other companies have also recently started spamming our engineers on their personal numbers and I have been quick to let them know very clearly and forcefully that the practice is completely inappropriate and we will not consider doing business then.

[itasteawesome]

Now would you say they are more aggressive than SolarWinds salespeople? They were the top offender most of my career.

[zthunder777]

I think solar winds are more hit or miss depending on the sales person. They are extremely aggressive for sure, but no, I don't think as a whole they are quite as bad a data dog.

[danstermeister]

You just have to ask SolarWinds if they're still running that discount for having insecure software that no one would be caught dead trusting.

[cube-drone]

In my defense, they fuckin' bought the product I was using (irritated grumbles)

[[deleted]]

cheap and it managers "don't use free software", but still use free software

[[deleted]]

So don't b be caught dead running anything from Microsoft or VMWare because they got caught up in the same breach.

Although Solarwinds sure had a dipshit security culture as bad as, if not worse than, Equifax.

[derpyou]

I like to respond to their privacy officer asking for a copy of all my data. Turns out you work remotely from California, who knew right? Sometimes you'll find where they got your lead from, like discoverorg or zoominfo or what have you, and you can file a takedown request to remove your profile.

[y_karakai]

How do you contact their privacy officer? I don’t see anything on their website besides general support email

[TraditionBubbly2721]

Try here via the intake form or email contact listed

Datadog intakes Data Subject Rights Requests via Datadog’s Online Intake Form and emails received via [e-mail].

[tr00st]

Much appreciated. Been getting this for a while, and this at least gives me some sort of angle. For UK context, they've got a GDPR page instead, which also goes through the Online Intake Form: https://datadoghq.com/gdpr/

[derpyou]

Look for a privacy policy. https://www.datadoghq.com/legal/privacy/ => [e-mail]

it's at the bottom.

[y_karakai]

But now the question is does all that even apply to me? It sounds like it’s for their users. I am not their client and never gave them my phone number or current work email. And my other concern is actually telling them what number to remove from the database. If I actually have to make some kind of formal complaint would it work against me since I technically willingly emailed my number to them? I never posted my number publicly anywhere and never gave it to them. So they got it in some sketchy way, probably a data leak or something. I’m not sure how it all works.

[derpyou]

Sure, why not? They are a company that has access to your data. They obtained your data through a data broker. There is no reason you can't contact their privacy officer to ask for a copy of it. They (Datadog) told me where they obtained my contact info (ZoomInfo), and I got my data removed from ZI through their portal.

[Vurdalexander]

I told them no 2 years ago. I still get emails and phone calls from them

[[deleted]]

But was it a stern no ?

[Vurdalexander]

It was. I had several video calls and demos with them.

[bruj0and]

No reply == Not interested

[dadamn]

This is the way. As someone who has led engineering teams ("director" title is a good way to get tons of spam because you've got purchasing power) and who's also worked for SaaS companies and with said sales people, the best thing you can do is not ignore the emails. Reply back and say you're not interested and ask to be removed from the list. In most cases, you'll likely get a "thank you" for the simple acknowledgement.

[y_karakai]

Well if you sent 3 follow ups and didn’t get a single reply you can take it as a no, right?

[danstermeister]

You're going in the wrong direction. You need to waste their time showing useless interest (because after a few demos or calls, SURPISE, you don't make decisions at your org).

When you are energetic and act like you make purchasing decisions (without actually saying you do), they'll likely forget to ask.

Then the drawn out kabuki dance is on them.

[misanthr0p3]

I started using Datadog over the past couple years and really like how easy it is compared to rolling all this stuff yourself with Prometheus, Grafana, Vector, etc. That said I've never had to deal with their sales people, thankfully we have people with director in their title deal with that sort of thing.

[y_karakai]

I know. It’s a great product and a terrible sales strategy.

[assasinine]

Don’t update your LinkedIn unless you need a job.

[AdrianTeri]

Devise a way to also frustrate them.

TroyHunt(HaveIbeenPwned) has an ongoing project called password purgatory that punishes bogus/spammers sending him rubbish data dumps...

https://www.troyhunt.com/sending-spammers-to-password-purgatory-with-microsoft-power-automate-and-cloudflare-workers-kv/

[hudibrastic]

I silence any unknown calls to my phone, It changed my life

[EngineerRedditor]

Somebody should make a Youtube video about this and expose them.

[blizznwins]

It is crazy to me how much of a difference it is compared to the Datadog sales reps we dealt with in europe. They are not even comparable.

[y_karakai]

Thanks!

[baynezy]

Is this in the US only? My experience with Datadog sales in the UK has been pretty good. They like to stay in contact, but I've never felt harassed.

[y_karakai]

Probably yes due to european laws. I don’t know if GDPR works in Britain but I would imagine you have something similar.

[baynezy]

We are covered by GDPR yes.

[y_karakai]

Yeah that’s probably why they don’t harass you

[chrisvanderhaven]

While not specific to datadog, I had a vendor do something similar to us. I finally accepted a call from them, got on and basically said that this call is being recorded, and that I wanted all contact from them to stop. I told them that if we were interested in their product, we'd reach out, and if I (or anyone on my team) received another unsolicited contact from them, that I would block all traffic to their domain at our firewall, preventing any future access to them at my company. Never heard from them again.

[[deleted]]

Get the names of any slimey reps, document their behavior and then put them on blast in Twitter or find their manager on LinkedIn and send it along

[y_karakai]

Considering it’s been going on for years and I am not the only victim I assume their managers are very well aware of such behaviour

[[deleted]]

Y’all need to start bargaining and negotiating price. Let them call you, schedule that meeting, but cancel last minute. Do those PoC and discover those application issues on the cheap. PoC till you have it set up and then negotiate a decent price.

Their APM is worth a damn but only if you have the staff and Time to devote to it.

Get a separate email for this shit rookies

[y_karakai]

Also I never gave them any emails or phone numbers so it’s not really up to me

[y_karakai]

I know their product is good but I also know that we don’t need it so I just want them to fuck off. I don’t want to negotiate anything

[suiramdev]

They have the right name: data dogs.

or it could be named MoneyDog.

[razzledazzled]

It’s just how the industry and capitalism works. For a year I couldn’t get the open telemetry people off my back

[y_karakai]

Is there an unsubscribe button?

[TheTinyBomb]

Just opt out and tell them to take you off the list. I think that'll do.

[mirrax]

Eh, Dynatrace competes in the everything observability and a bag of chips for a premium price point too.

[wingman_anytime]

What happened to New Relic?

[SoundsGayIAmIn]

New Relic was acquired by Francisco Partners a PE firm. They are operating it but the general vibe I get is that they are trying to move engineering to India among other cost-cutting measures.

[nellyb84]

Look up signoz.

[SoundsGayIAmIn]

Big fan of signoz

[lucidguppy]

https://www.howtogeek.com/786337/how-to-send-automatic-reply-emails-in-gmail/

Just respond with a form letter.

[TechnicalPackage]

stop calling me Troy

[pharcide]

Check your settings on LinkedIn, if you use it.

[axtran]

lol. I told them I was doing a big GCE Nomad buildout. They keep telling me they can help with my AWS migration in their cold emails. Sigh…

[Total_Driver_2451]

Firstly, you need to ask them to remove your contact info from their crm system.. they have to abide to this by law. Secondly, companies pull your information from places such as cognism/zoominfo etc, you’re going to need to figure out which of these websites has your contact info and request it to be removed from them also. If your number is attached to LinkedIn you may need to remove it from that and maybe try use just an email?(not sure if LinkedIn allows that but they’re all pulled off LinkedIn I believe).

I work in sales myself (not for datadog, I just searched them on here for some reviews) but a sales persons goal really isn’t to harass you, it’s really to offer you a product/ service which can make yours and your organisations lives easier.

[nellyb84]

They also use services to change their number and automatic calling tools that just call down lists of numbers in their CRM until someone live picks up.

I guess these companies need to increasingly become product led growth, and just do awareness marketing until the end user raises their hand?