Observability platform company groundcover has launched a new migration tool to help organisations move their observability stacks from other vendors (such as Datadog) to its own platform. The company is claiming that organisations can migrate metrics, dashboards and monitors with full automation, and without needing any downtime nor consultants.
Announced on 11 November 2025, groundcover’s tool aims to address migration inertia, frequently cited as a big obstacle when companies consider moving away from legacy observability platforms. The announcement from Groundworks suggests that, when moving between platforms, organisations often feel constrained by the complexities of preserving existing dashboards, alerts, dashboards and custom metrics. groundcover’s tool tries to minimise engineering overhead by fully automating tasks such as metric mapping, dashboard recreation, alert migration and integrations to clouds like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
A separate blog post by groundcover emphasises the goals of cost savings and reduced risk. The company asserts that migrating observability stacks conventionally might take six months and involve consulting fees up to US$200,000, whereas the new tool reduces that to days and much lower cost. For organisations spending millions on observability annually, groundcover claims there is now “a real option” to reduce that substantially.
This blog provides insight into the engineering effort behind the migration tool, in particular the efforts to make a move from Datadog seamless. The team collected over three hundred predefined metric translations to map Datadog naming conventions to Prometheus or OpenTelemetry formats used in groundcover. For example, metrics such as kubernetes.cpu.usage in Datadog are automatically mapped to container_cpu_usage_seconds_total in groundcover. Custom metrics or unique schema rules can be defined by users, after which it is claimed that the system learns and applies corrections across dashboards and monitors.
Dashboard recreation has been designed to be pixel-perfect to make migrated dashboards look the same as they did in Datadog. groundcover re-engineered its dashboard rendering engine so layouts, visual elements and widgets match closely the original Datadog versions. There is support for floating layouts, sections and grouped visualisations so that a dashboard with three columns, a header section and grouped visualisations will appear identically in groundcover. If a widget type is not supported, it is flagged clearly. Side-by-side validation enables users to compare original Datadog dashboards with their groundcover counterparts query by query, panel by panel, before switching over.
Shahar Azulay, Chief Executive Officer of groundcover, contributed further commentary in a LinkedIn post. Azulay observed that in one month three legacy vendors released their own “BYOC” (Bring Your Own Cloud) offerings. He asserted that customers now demand BYOC because of data privacy, cost efficiency, control and preparedness for AI applications. He wrote “what the legacy vendors rolled out isn’t yet full BYOC — it’s limited, manual, restricted, and only available to their biggest accounts.” Azulay emphasised that groundcover has provided “true BYOC from day one. no SaaS offerings. no half-measures. just BYOC.” This reflects groundcover’s business model: storage of customer data remains in the customer’s own environment, so the company does not depend on margin from vendor-imposed cloud lock-in. Azulay suggests that this flips around the traditional observability pricing model based on data volume or sampling, which he argues perpetuates lock-in. This is supported by community feedback, such as in a recent Reddit thread entitled “observability platform pricing, why won’t vendors give straight answers?”
groundcover are positioning the migration tool as a relief from vendor lock-in; where legacy platforms have benefitted from the high cost of moving away, which has functioned as a moat. groundcover aims to lower the cost and complexity of this to avoid a migration being a big costly disruption. As the migration tool is ultimately a product feature rather than a consulting engagement, it is offered as part of the product for groundcover customers at no extra cost.
Another selling point is inclusion: the Migration Tool is offered as part of the product for groundcover customers, with no extra cost. It is not a consulting engagement but a product feature, declared as fully automated, self-service and without engineering dependencies beyond the user.
To kick off a migration, groundcover connects to Datadog with a read-only API key to discover dashboards, monitors, integrations and custom metrics. It then automatically builds dependency graphs, maps metrics, recreates dashboards, flags anything that is unsupported, and prompts to setup any integrations that are needed for continuity.
groundcover’s migration tool is currently in private preview. General availability is expected around AWS re:Invent in early December.
