Seamless Datadog to Elastic migration

Transition your infrastructure from Datadog to Elastic without operational friction, engineering overhead or upfront costs.

Request your custom migration plan

The frictionless route to Elastic

Datadog is highly effective for initial out-of-the-box visibility. However, scaling enterprise workloads introduces compounding licensing costs and unpredictable pricing structures.

Managing expanding data streams across fragmented per-host, per-log, and per-trace billing metrics introduces significant budget friction. This often forces expanding engineering teams to compromise on visibility to control costs.

Our senior engineers execute your end-to-end migration at no additional charge, ensuring a structured, zero-downtime transition without operational friction or engineering overhead.

Why engineering teams move from Datadog to Elastic

While Datadog provides a feature rich interface out of the box, its multi-layered licensing model creates severe financial strain and technical silos as operations scale.

Moving to Elastic unifies your log, metric, and trace infrastructure into a single, resource-based billing model, giving your engineering teams deep operational visibility without scaling penalties.

Datadog limitations

High per-host pricing: Baseline costs rise sharply alongside telemetry growth as your infrastructure expands.

Proprietary query language and storage: Relying on vendor data structures and custom query tools restricts how you interact with data.

Closed ecosystem dependency: Operating within a closed system limits your architectural choice and increases single-vendor dependency.

Costly retention extensions: Extending storage timelines to keep your historical data accessible introduces significant financial friction.

Scaling complexity: Maintaining complete estate visibility across separate, expanding layers becomes increasingly complex to manage.

The Elastic solution

Infrastructure-driven scaling: Scale horizontally on commodity hardware or cloud environments to keep growth cost-effective.

Flexible ingestion frameworks: Leverage OpenTelemetry (OTel), Elastic Agents and Beats to maintain complete control over data collection.

Open platform foundation: Build on an open ecosystem utilising Elastic, ensuring your underlying data layer remains completely transparent.

Efficient lifecycle management: Use ILM and searchable snapshots to store historical data across efficient, low-cost tiers.

Unified operational dashboards: Consolidate estate-wide visibility within Kibana, using machine learning to surface insights automatically.

Architectural advantages

Elastic is built to handle high-volume telemetry across modern IT environments, reducing operational overhead and improving query performance.

Horizontal scaling

Add nodes to expand capacity smoothly without reconfiguring pipelines.

Queryable cold tiers

Access deep historical data instantly without the need for manual indexing.

OTel-first ingestion

Collect telemetry from multiple sources with zero vendor lock-in.

Native profiling

Obtain code-level insights for precise performance optimisation.

Elastic common schema

Standardise and correlate data across all infrastructure sources.

Flexible ingestion

Connect any data source with our flexible API and extensive library of pre-built connectors.

Embedded AI/ML

Surface operational anomalies and automate alerting across all live telemetry streams.

Unified security analytics

Run real-time threat detection and SIEM capabilities across your entire log estate without cost penalties.

The managed migration blueprint

Our senior engineers follow a structured, low risk framework covering everything from initial inventory to live production cutover.

Every phase, including migration planning, pipeline configuration, data transfer, and dashboard conversion, is executed by our team at no additional cost to you.

1. Mapping your current Datadog setup

Before modifying active pipelines, we audit your Datadog setup to plan the move safely. This initial discovery phase maps out your operational dependencies within the first few weeks:

Datadog telemetry inventory

Document active metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and integrations running in your environment.

Data volume assessment:

Review ingestion rates and retention rules to model your future lower-cost Elastic storage footprint.

APM & tracing

Map out distributed tracing and application performance monitoring with native OTel support.

Security analytics

Detect threats and anomalies with SIEM-powered security insights and automated responses.

Dashboards & monitors

Locate critical team dashboards and alert settings to ensure continuous operational visibility.

Access governance & APIs:

Review existing user roles, permission settings, and API keys to maintain strict data security.

2. Switching to open standards

We build fast, clean pathways to send your data into Elastic. This phase replaces closed vendor tools with open standards and deep performance insights:

Total data sovereignty via OTel

Configure OTel collectors to ensure full, permanent ownership of your pipelines and infrastructure.

Schema standardisation

Map telemetry fields to standard formats for seamless cross-domain querying from day one.

Pipeline configuration

Set up open collectors to stream data smoothly while keeping tasks separate.

Data enrichment

Automatically label data with cloud environments, service names and team ownership.

3. Running both platforms together

To ensure complete business continuity and strict data validation, we operate both platforms simultaneously side-by-side:

Parallel data flow

Split your data streams to feed into both systems simultaneously, allowing thorough testing without disrupting daily operations.

Dashboard parity

Refine critical monitoring views inside Kibana, delivering cleaner, more useful interfaces rather than simply copying old designs.

Integrity validation

Run automated checks to ensure accurate data gathering and correct alert firing before decommissioning your legacy tools.

4. Securing and finalising the move

We switch your production workloads over smoothly without interrupting your daily infrastructure monitoring:

Access & governance realignment

Replicate team roles natively inside Elastic, keeping existing security rules perfectly intact.

Data protection

Verify that your data is fully encrypted both while in transit and while stored at rest.

Managed cutover

Gradually shift daily workflows, team alerts, and automated systems to Elastic before safely closing down your old footprint.

Outperform with Elastic

Transition to a high-performance data architecture without upfront overhead. Gain total transparency, expert engineering, and a pricing model that scales perfectly with your growth.

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