[Workshop] How to migrate from Datadog without losing a single dashboard

​Datadog's per-host and ingest-based pricing pushes you to sample traces and drop cardinality to control spend, so you end up with partial visibility right when you need the full picture.This workshop walks through migrating a live service off Datadog and onto a groundcover environment (which is based on OSS technologies to prevent lock-in), end to end, in one sitting.

​You’ll explore your Kubernetes workload and deploy groundcover to observe it live. Because collection is eBPF-based at the node level, there's no code to instrument, no agents to add. From there you’ll use our migrating agent to rebuild the existing Datadog dashboards and alerts side by side, map PromQL/OTel queries across, and confirm parity.

​We'll also cover the deployment model: how groundcover runs inside your own cloud so that telemetry and storage stay in your account (as a self-hosted OSS stack without standing up and maintaining ClickHouse, collectors, and a query layer yourself).

​You don't need to know groundcover to follow along. Familiarity with Kubernetes and a Datadog setup is helpful, but the migration path is designed to be approachable and reproducible on your own cluster afterward.

​Here's a step-by-step guide to deploying your groundcover backend ahead of time.