BMC Helix ends Stackify Retrace on 31 March 2027 with no automated move

BMC Helix ends Stackify Retrace on 31 March 2027 with no automated move

9 November 2026: BMC Helix will end Stackify Retrace and Stackify Prefix Premium on 31 March 2027, and because Retrace is delivered only as a service, customers will not be able to log in, send data or reach stored information after that date. The company's own FAQ warns there is "no simple automated conversion" to anything else, so development teams face a re-instrumentation project with about five months to complete it.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on the end of life letter and FAQ on Stackify's documentation site, read on 9 November 2026, which carry no publication date. BMC Helix has not published the transition incentives it mentions. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Maintenance mode has already begun

Until the end date the product gets no new features or enhancements. BMC Helix will develop hotfixes for issues of high business impact, and critical fixes and security updates as needed, and support is limited to critical issues. Stackify Customer Support stays reachable at support@stackify.com until 31 March 2027, and there is no extended support afterwards.

BMC gives two reasons. Its observability strategy is moving to open standards such as OpenTelemetry, and Retrace depends on underlying cloud services that reach their own end of life in March 2027, so the timelines were aligned. A contract running past the date will be aligned with it directly, the FAQ says, without giving terms.

The agents are the real work

Retrace collects data with its own agents and profilers, so a move to any other platform means removing them and adding that platform's instrumentation to every application. A team with Retrace wired into many services should count those services first, as that number sets the size of the job more than the choice of vendor does.

The letter sets out four routes, each using OpenTelemetry as the common standard:

• Helix AIOps with OpenTelemetry, aimed at organisations with enterprise operations needs or an existing BMC Helix footprint. It needs a new tenant, an enterprise licence and enablement by request, and its scope is wider than Retrace's.
• A commercial application performance tool, shortlisted and trialled with real traffic. Some accept OTLP and others rely on their own agents, and prices vary with data volume.
• Open source and self-hosted, pairing Jaeger or Grafana Tempo with Prometheus and Loki, or an OpenTelemetry-native option such as SigNoz. The customer then runs, scales, secures and builds alerting for it.
• Dual export while deciding, in which the OpenTelemetry Collector sends the same data to two backends at once, at the price of short-term cost and noise.

History does not follow you

Customers are responsible for exporting whatever they want to keep before the end date, and the FAQ links to pages on exporting logs and sharing custom dashboards. BMC says that guidance on data export and transition planning will be supplied ahead of the date, and that any data left behind will be handled under applicable regulatory and compliance requirements. It does not say how long that will take or when deletion happens.

Transition incentives are promised for those moving to Helix AIOps, but details are still being finalised because Helix is licensed differently from Retrace. A team that wants those terms in its comparison should ask BMC Helix Sales in writing now and not wait for the announcement.

Other monitoring tools we list

Our application performance management category holds 18 products, among them Atatus and Lumigo. Stackify does not have a listing with us.

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Sources

• Stackify documentation: Stackify Retrace End of Life Announcement (read 9 November 2026), 9 November 2026
• Shutdown Watch: list of upcoming software closures, 9 November 2026