Working with Third Parties Shouldn't Suck

As an SRE, you're not just responsible for building automation. Sometimes the work we do requires us to reach out to a third-party to take advantage of services they offer, such as Site Monitoring (Catchpoint, Keynote, Pingdom, ThousandEyes, etc), Log Aggregation (Splunk, Sumo Logic, Datadog, Loggly, etc.), Chat (Slack, Discord, HipChat, etc.).

Many of us have had to weigh the benefit of building or buying, integrating, and managing third-parties. Beyond the scope of features and functionality, there are a lot of things to consider related to working with a vendor, like customer support, pricing, scalability, flexibility, roadmap, track record, and real-world proving of their capabilities. There are things that may matter to you and some that don't. Let's dive into how a bad selection could be costly.