How Lookout broke free from 8 years of lock-in to AI-native observability in 6 weeks
We never thought we could easily switch until Oodle proved otherwise. They migrated thousands of nodes, dashboards, and alerts in weeks. Our costs dropped and performance improved.
Nagendra Swamy
VP Engineering, Lookout
5x
Cost Reduction
AI-Native
Query, debug & create dashboards in English
2,000
Alerts Migrated
300+
Dashboards Migrated
Lookout is a cybersecurity unicorn serving 2000+ enterprises specializing in mobile endpoint security.
IndustryCybersecurity
Company size500-1000
Migrated fromLeading Observability Platform (8 years)
Challenge
“From a contractual perspective, we were kinda locked in a situation where we were spending a lot more than we wanted.”
“The fact that we had the contract for so long meant that we had a lot of unnecessary stuff in there that had accumulated over the years.”
— Francisco J. Reyes, Senior Director
After 8 years with a leading observability platform, Lookout found themselves trapped in a cycle of rising costs and vendor lock-in. What started as a manageable observability setup had grown into an expensive, bloated contract filled with unused features and accumulating overhead.
Pain Points:
Spiraling Costs: Despite the discounted legacy pricing over the years, the contract remained extremely expensive.
Contractual lock-in: 8 years of accumulated tooling and configurations, much of it unnecessary and unused, made it nearly impossible to renegotiate or walk away.
Migration Risk: The scale of thousands of nodes, 300+ dashboards, and 2,000 alerts made migration seem daunting.
Solution
Why Lookout Finally Made the Switch
Beyond cost and migration risk, Lookout wanted an AI-native platform aligned with where their engineering org is heading. Here's what made the switch easy, in Beatrice Gelman's words:
“Being able to leverage our existing agents was a nice surprise. Without this, the migration of this magnitude would have taken a lot longer.”
“We appreciate the receptiveness of suggestions. Oodle quickly delivered AWS integration via CloudWatch pull with tag based filtering when we needed. They also developed a new built-in Kubernetes experience which impressed my team.”
What made the difference:
Native agent compatibility: Data ingested from existing agents. No app code changes.
AI-native by design: AI assistant and MCP built in, across the UI, Slack, Cursor, and Claude Code.
Vendor-owned migration: Oodle handled the heavy lifting of the dashboard and alert migration through AI-assisted automation.
Predictable Costs: Simple pricing model with cost & usage attribution ensured controlled costs for now and the future.
White-glove support: Direct engineering access, dedicated Slack channel, and super-responsive team.
Impact
Breaking Free After 8 Years
“We achieved full migration in six weeks at our size. I'm thrilled by how much we could accomplish in such a short time.”
Beatrice Gelman, Sr. Manager, Software Engineering
“I LOVE the AI assistant feature, it saves me a ton of time modifying graphs, creating alerts etc.”
Sr. Staff Software Engineer
5x cost reduction: Dramatic savings after eliminating [their previous vendor's] bloated contract.
300+ dashboards and 2,000 alerts preserved: Complete continuity with no lost configurations.
Ecosystem flexibility: Freed from vendor lock-in with open-standards based observability.
Hours saved with AI Assistant: Engineers build and modify dashboards and alerts in plain English instead of queries.
“The approachability, the turnaround time, the openness to feedback - it's genuinely unmatched. Everyone on our team feels the same way.”
Beatrice Gelman, Sr. Manager, Software Engineering
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