BMC Helix has confirmed that Stackify Retrace is entering maintenance mode ahead of its official End of Life on March 31, 2027. If your team relies on Retrace for APM and logging, now is the right time to evaluate what comes next without rushing the decision. Atatus is a modern, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built to give engineering teams complete visibility across applications, infrastructure, and user experience in one place.
Stackify Retrace handles APM and logging well for .NET and Java applications. But modern teams need more than backend monitoring. Retrace lacks Session Replay, Synthetic Monitoring, and Real User Monitoring forcing teams to add separate tools for frontend visibility and proactive checks. You end up managing multiple vendors, dashboards, and invoices. Atatus unifies APM, RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Logs, and Infrastructure in one platform with straightforward per-host pricing. No capability gaps. No tool sprawl.
Retrace covers APM, logs, and basic server monitoring well but you'll need separate tools for synthetic monitoring, session replay, and API analytics. Atatus includes all of it natively with correlated data across every signal.
Retrace has no synthetic monitoring. With Atatus, you run browser scripts and API checks from global locations 24/7, detecting outages and regressions before any real user is affected, even during off-hours with zero organic traffic.
When a user reports a frustrating bug, Retrace gives you nothing on the frontend. Atatus session replay lets you watch exactly what they experienced such as every click, scroll, network call, and JS error and fix it in minutes.
Here's when Atatus delivers the most value for engineering teams evaluating a Stackify Retrace alternative.
If your observability stops at the server and you need visibility into what real users experience in the browser, Atatus adds comprehensive RUM, Core Web Vitals, and session replay without a second tool.
If you're relying on users to report downtime because Retrace can't simulate traffic proactively, Atatus Synthetic runs global checks around the clock even with zero real user sessions active.
If Retrace's limited container support leaves blind spots in your Kubernetes or Docker environments, Atatus provides pod-level metrics, namespace health, and cluster dashboards out of the box.
If you're investing in OTel for vendor-neutral instrumentation, Atatus supports it natively. Retrace requires its proprietary agent — there is no OpenTelemetry path available, meaning you are locked in indefinitely.
If you need per-endpoint latency trends, error rate breakdowns, and throughput analytics for your REST APIs, Atatus API Analytics provides this natively - a capability Retrace simply does not offer.
If a weekend production incident leaves your team waiting for Retrace's business-hours support window, Atatus provides 24/7 support on every single plan including free trials.
BMC's stated reasoning is a shift toward OpenTelemetry-based, AIOps-driven observability under its Helix product line, combined with the scheduled retirement of the underlying cloud infrastructure that Retrace runs on. Because Retrace is SaaS-only, there's no self-hosted fallback once the platform is switched off such as login, ingestion, and historical data all stop on the End of Life date. That's the practical reason to start evaluating a replacement now rather than in early 2027.
March 31, 2027 - both Stackify Retrace and Stackify Prefix Premium reach End of Life on this date.
Retrace is in maintenance mode: no new features, only critical hotfixes and security patches.
Standard Stackify Customer Support remains available through the End of Life date.
Retrace becomes fully inaccessible, no login, no data ingestion, no access to historical data.
Customers are responsible for exporting anything they want to keep before the cutoff date.
Migration urgency isn't the same for every team. Here's a direct recommendation based on the situations we see most often.
| Your situation | Recommended action |
|---|---|
| Regulated industry with audit or compliance monitoring requirements | Start migration now. Don't risk an audit trail gap close to the EOL date. |
| Already paying for synthetic monitoring, session replay, or API analytics separately | Migrate now. You're paying for the gap today, not just after 2027. |
| Running Kubernetes or containerized workloads Retrace can't see clearly | Migrate now. This is a capability gap independent of the EOL timeline. |
| Locked into an annual Stackify contract with time left on it | Run Atatus in parallel starting now, cut over fully at your contract renewal. |
| Small, stable .NET-only environment with no urgent pain points | Start a free trial to benchmark now, plan full migration into your 2026 roadmap. |
| No engineering bandwidth right now | Run a read-only trial in parallel to validate coverage, revisit before Q4 2026 budget planning. |
Both platforms deliver enterprise-grade capabilities. The differences lie in how those capabilities are packaged, accessed, and experienced by your team.
Unified platform: APM, RUM, Synthetic, Infrastructure, Logs, and API Analytics in one subscription, one dashboard
Automatic signal correlation jump from a frontend error to the backend trace to the log line in one click
Flat per-host pricing with no production/non-production tier split and no overage charges
OpenTelemetry native; use vendor-neutral instrumentation and stay free to switch backends at any time
90-day data retention on all paid plans; no upgrades needed to keep data longer than 30 days
Unlimited team members on all plans; full dashboard access for every developer and on-call engineer
24/7 customer support on every plan including free trials; no waiting for business hours
Actively developed platform with no End of Life scheduled
APM-first platform including synthetic monitoring, session replay, and API analytics require separate third-party tools
Signals are partially correlated, navigating between APM, logs, and server metrics requires context switching
Host-hour billing with production vs. non-production environment tiers, overage charges apply when limits are exceeded
Proprietary agents only; no OpenTelemetry support, no path to migrate instrumentation independently
Data retention varies by plan longer retention typically requires a plan upgrade
User seat limits depend on plan tier, expanding access adds cost
Support limited to extended business hours, weekend and overnight incidents may go without a response
Confirmed End of Life: March 31, 2027, per BMC Helix's official notice
“We were using Retrace for APM but kept running into walls with no synthetic tests, no session replay, no Kubernetes support. We had three tools stitched together. Atatus replaced all of them. The migration took a few days and we immediately had visibility we never had before.”
These are the questions that come up on every evaluation call. Answered directly, without spin.
BMC Helix, which owns Stackify, is shifting its observability strategy toward OpenTelemetry-based, AIOps-driven products under the Helix brand. Retrace also depends on underlying cloud infrastructure that's scheduled for its own retirement in March 2027, which lines up with Retrace's End of Life date.
March 31, 2027. Until that date, Retrace stays in maintenance mode, your existing environment keeps working, but there are no new features, only critical fixes, and Standard Stackify Customer Support remains available.
Per BMC's official notice, customers are responsible for exporting any data they want to retain before March 31, 2027. After that date, Retrace is no longer accessible for login, ingestion, or historical data, so it's worth planning your export and cutover timeline well ahead of the deadline rather than at the last minute.
The right answer depends on what you need beyond APM. For teams that only need .NET or Java backend monitoring, several APM-only tools are comparable to Retrace. For teams that also need Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, Session Replay, Kubernetes visibility, and native OpenTelemetry in a single platform, Atatus is built specifically to cover that full range without adding separate vendors.
It's confirmed, not a rumor. BMC Helix, which owns Stackify, published an official End of Life customer letter setting March 31, 2027 as the End of Life date for both Stackify Retrace and Stackify Prefix Premium. The product is currently in maintenance mode ahead of that date.
Both platforms offer APM, centralized logging, and basic infrastructure monitoring. The fundamental difference is breadth. Stackify Retrace is an APM-first tool with deep .NET and Java code profiling, it's strong for teams that need byte-code level instrumentation of traditional server-side applications. Atatus is a full-stack observability platform that adds Synthetic Monitoring, Session Replay, API Analytics, and deep Kubernetes support natively in the same product. Retrace also requires its proprietary agent with no OpenTelemetry path, whereas Atatus supports OTel from day one. For teams running modern stacks with frontend applications, containers, and microservices, Atatus covers the full observability surface without requiring supplementary tools.
Stackify Prefix is a lightweight local development profiler that helps catch SQL issues and exceptions before code is committed. Atatus doesn't have a direct Prefix equivalent, but the same Atatus agent runs identically in staging and development environments, giving you full trace and error visibility pre-production. For teams that heavily depend on Prefix's local profiling workflow, this is a genuine trade-off worth acknowledging. Most teams find that Atatus's broader production and staging observability more than compensates, but it's an honest difference between the two products.
Atatus provides full APM support for .NET (including .NET Core and ASP.NET MVC), Java (Spring, Hibernate, and JVM frameworks), and their surrounding ecosystems. You get distributed tracing, slow transaction analysis, database query monitoring, and error tracking for both. Retrace's .NET profiling is arguably more granular at the byte-code level, if your team runs complex legacy .NET with very deep profiling requirements, Retrace may offer a marginal edge in that specific dimension. However, Atatus covers production .NET and Java observability comprehensively for the vast majority of teams, while also supporting your frontend applications, Kubernetes infrastructure, and synthetic checks without additional subscriptions.
Every migration includes a dedicated onboarding session with our engineering team. We review your current Retrace setup, map your APM coverage language by language to Atatus, configure agents, and validate coverage parity before you wind down Retrace. We also help you stand up any new capabilities you didn't have before Synthetic Monitoring, Session Replay, API Analytics. Migration support is completely free: no professional services fees, no hourly rates. For Business plans and above, you get a named technical contact throughout the migration and beyond.
14-day free trial. Full platform. No credit card required. Migration support included. Join with teams who switched from Stackify · Average setup time: under 10 minutes