This guest blog post is authored by Nick Vecellio, Principal Engineer and Co-founder of NoBS, a Premier Datadog Partner specializing in hands-on Datadog migrations and optimizations.
At NoBS, we help enterprises migrate their observability stack to Datadog. Teams often come to us after a migration has technically “worked,” but the new setup requires optimization tweaks to provide the clarity, reliability, or operational benefits they’re looking for.
After supporting hundreds of migrations across infrastructure, APM, and logs, we see the same patterns repeated. The most common mistake? Teams treat Datadog as a destination for existing dashboards and alerts instead of viewing the migration as an opportunity to rethink how their observability should work.
That’s why, when we talk with teams about migrating to Datadog, we use a simple analogy: Think of the migration like moving into a new house. When you move, you don’t bring everything. You decide what still serves you and where the items worth keeping belong in the new space. A Datadog migration should follow the same thought process. While it’s tempting to view it as a lift and shift of dashboards and monitors, that’s not the right mindset. Instead, you should look at the migration as a chance to redesign your observability around flexibility, reuse, and actionability.
