10 reasons not to use bitdrift: 5, you don’t want to risk the migration

Migrations can be disruptive, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous.

• What if you miss crashes during the transition?
• What if instrumentation takes weeks?
• What if dashboards break?
• What if alerts stop firing?

Mobile observability isn’t something you can afford to get wrong, which is why many teams stick with what they have, even when it isn’t working very well. But migrating to bitdrift, if done right, can be low risk, low effort, and stress free. Why? Because there are no hard cut-offs with bitdrift. bitdrift runs alongside your existing solution, allowing you to migrate gradually, at your own pace, without compromising performance, stability, or your users’ experience. Here’s what that process actually looks like.

Step 1: Install the Capture SDK alongside your existing tool

Migration starts by installing bitdrift’s Capture SDK alongside whatever you already use. Crashlytics, Sentry, Datadog, New Relic … we’ve seen them all. Both tools run simultaneously, capturing the same sessions, crashes, logs, and network activity. This allows you to validate bitdrift safely using real production traffic, without risking visibility during the transition. There’s no disruption, and nothing stops working.

Step 2: Automatically capture logs and networking

bitdrift integrates directly with common logging and networking frameworks. For Android apps we support Timber and OkHttp. For iOS, SwiftyBeaver, CocoaLumberjack and URLSession. In many cases, bitdrift begins capturing useful telemetry immediately, with minimal or no code changes. Your existing logging continues to work exactly as before.

Step 2(b): Wrap custom instrumentation (if needed)

If your app uses custom logging or networking layers, migration is still straightforward. bitdrift provides simple APIs that allow you to forward logs, spans, and network events from your existing abstractions. (For an example of how to do this, see our hands-on guide for instrumenting Wikipedia’s Android app.) This typically involves adding a single forwarding call inside your existing logging or networking wrapper, with no disruption to your existing solution.

Step 3: Compare results in parallel

Once bitdrift is running, you can compare it directly with your existing tool. Both systems observe the same sessions, so you can validate crashes, performance, and errors side-by-side. You can also deploy workflows to capture those weird edge cases your existing tools might miss (for more on this topic see the previous post in this series). Most teams immediately discover issues they couldn’t see before, including:

• Slow app starts affecting real users
• Network failures that never triggered alerts
• Performance degradation at p95 and p99
• Context leading up to crashes

There’s no leap of faith required. You can verify everything yourself.

Step 4: Start your dashboard migration with Instant Insights

One of the biggest concerns about migration is recreating all your existing dashboards. bitdrift eliminates much of this effort with Instant Insights, out-of-the-box dashboards that begin working the moment you install the Capture SDK. Instant Insights includes:

• Stability reports showing crashes and fatal issue trends
• Network performance dashboards highlighting latency and failures by endpoint
• App health metrics, such as startup performance and responsiveness
• Resource utilization, including memory and disk usage

These dashboards require zero configuration and immediately provide actionable visibility. Most teams begin identifying real issues within hours. Once you’re comfortable, you can recreate any custom dashboards your team relies on. (The bitdrift team is also happy to help!) When you’re ready, you can recreate any custom dashboards your team relies on. Often with greater accuracy, thanks to bitdrift’s unsampled telemetry.

Step 5: Keep your existing alerting workflows

Migrating alerts is another disruptive part of any migration. bitdrift integrates directly with your existing alerting tools, including Slack, PagerDuty, AWS SNS, and Datadog. You can begin sending alerts from bitdrift into your existing incident pipelines immediately, so your team continues receiving alerts exactly where they expect them. Nothing breaks. Nothing changes overnight. Over time, you can gradually expand bitdrift’s role as you gain confidence.

Step 6: Turn off your old tool when you’re ready

Once you’re confident that bitdrift is capturing everything you need, you can remove your existing tool. There’s no forced cutover. Some teams complete the process in days. Others run both tools in parallel for weeks. Either way, the transition is safe, controlled, and reversible.

Common migration concerns

When teams evaluate bitdrift, two concerns often come up: bandwidth impact and logging costs.

Bandwidth impact

Many observability tools continuously upload logs from user devices, consuming CPU, battery, and network bandwidth. bitdrift works differently. By default, logs are metricized and aggregated locally on the device. Only lightweight aggregates are transmitted for dashboards and alerting. This dramatically reduces network usage while still providing full visibility. Detailed logs are only uploaded when needed to debug specific crashes or performance issues. For most apps, the bandwidth impact of installing bitdrift is negligible.

Logging costs

Many observability platforms charge based on log ingestion volume, which discourages teams from collecting the data they actually need. bitdrift does not charge based on log volume. And because logs are processed on-device by default, you aren’t continuously transmitting or storing unnecessary data. This removes the tradeoff between cost and visibility. You can capture detailed telemetry when needed, and not have to worry about runaway costs.

Migration isn’t the real risk

Teams often overestimate the difficulty of migration and underestimate the cost of limited visibility. The real risk isn’t switching tools, it’s operating without understanding what your users are truly experiencing. If you’re OK with that and don’t want to risk the migration, you probably shouldn’t use bitdrift. But if you care about your user experience, migrating is easier than you think. If this resonates, check out Reason #1 / #2 / #3 / #4 here. And if you want to try bitdrift for yourself, sign up for free to see it in action.