All use cases
MIGRATION

Move off Datadog without losing dashboards or breaking alerts

Datadog spend is doubling year-over-year and the team is locked in by hundreds of dashboards and alert rules.

"When I plan the Datadog exit, I want a dual-run pattern, a portability checklist, and a cutover script, so my team doesn't lose visibility for a single minute during the migration."

The problem

Datadog is the most common 'help us escape this' conversation we have, and the friction is real. Hundreds of dashboards, hundreds of monitors, custom tagging conventions, on-call routing rules, APM-instrumented services. A naive cutover loses visibility; a parallel-run is expensive. Most teams put off the migration for another year, and the bill grows another 50%.

How Nova solves it

Nova's migration path is dual-run by default. You ingest into both systems, build out Nova while Datadog stays live, then cut over once everything is green.

  1. OpenTelemetry-native ingest

    If your services already emit OTel, Nova consumes them with no code change. If they don't, the OTel collector pattern means a one-time instrumentation effort that's portable to any future backend.

  2. Dashboard and alert importer

    Nova translates Datadog dashboard JSON, monitor definitions, and tag schemas into native Nova equivalents. Manual touch-up is for nuances; the bulk is automated.

  3. Phased cutover with safety net

    Run dual-stack for two weeks, switch alerting to Nova, leave Datadog in shadow for another two weeks, then turn off the Datadog billing. Total time, six weeks for a typical mid-size shop.

Teams that migrate from Datadog to Nova typically retire 60-80% of Datadog spend in the first year (Nova replaces APM, log management, and infra monitoring) and cut total observability cost by 50-70%.

Try this on your stack

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