The dashboard configuration issue was actually one of the pain points we targeted initially. It was an issue we experienced too. And we talked to a lot of our friends who had spent significant time setting these dashboards up in Datadog. One of our initial goals has been to try to automate to get you 95% of the way there without any configuration on your end. We've also tried to make alerting really easy and are working to automate the process of setting smart alerts. Would love to chat more about your experience if you are open to it. My email is nate (at) containiq (dot) com
OpsTrace took an interesting approach (and was a YC company too, recently acquired by GitLab). We are a managed solution, whereas OpsTrace was a self hosted open source solution. And we are not building on top of other open source tools. With ContainIQ, you can get metrics natively and other features that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get (ex p95 latency by endpoint) with OpsTrace and its integrations.
Pixie is definitely similar in their eBPF based approach. I believe there are differences in the types of data they collect and correlate with. For example we collect logs and state information (node status, node conditions, pod scheduled ect) along side our eBPF based metrics like latency. I'm sure there are things they collect that we don’t as well.
I agree. We are planning to launch a free edition with limited size and data retention. For users to try / play with before paying. It is in the works and we hope to have this out in the next few months.