Cisco Announces End of Life for Smartlook

Cisco has officially announced that Smartlook, a popular session replay and product analytics tool, will reach its End of Sale on May 31, 2026, with a complete End of Life scheduled for August 31, 2027.

This decision follows Cisco's acquisition of the company in May 2023. For organizations currently relying on Smartlook for user behavior tracking, this necessitates a migration plan over the coming months.

Background: Smartlook and the Cisco Acquisition

Smartlook was founded in 2016 in Brno, Czech Republic. Initially launched as a straightforward session recording script for websites, it eventually expanded into a comprehensive product analytics suite capable of tracking complex events and recording native mobile application sessions.

In May 2023, Cisco acquired Smartlook. The acquisition was driven by Cisco's goal to integrate Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities into its enterprise AppDynamics suite. Smartlook's technology provided the missing link between backend server monitoring and frontend user interactions.

With the core session replay and mobile monitoring technology now integrated into Cisco's Full-Stack Observability platform, the standalone Smartlook product is being sunset.

Timeline: What the Shutdown Means

According to Cisco's official End-of-Life bulletins, the deprecation of Smartlook follows this schedule:

• May 31, 2026 (End of Sale): The last day to order the product or create new accounts. The product effectively enters maintenance mode, and no new features will be shipped.
• August 31, 2026 (End of Renewal): The final date existing customers can renew or modify their current subscriptions.
• August 31, 2027 (Last Date of Support): The servers will be shut down. The product will become obsolete, and all access to dashboards and historical data will be revoked.

The Technical Challenge of Exporting Session Replays

When standard SaaS tools shut down, users can typically export their historical data to a CSV or database file and import it into a competitor's platform. However, qualitative analytics tools present a specific technical limitation: session replays are generally not exportable.

Session recordings are not standard video files like .mp4. Generating video files for every user session would consume massive amounts of bandwidth and severely impact site performance. Instead, tools like Smartlook record a serialized stream of the initial Document Object Model (DOM) state, followed by compressed JSON logs of subsequent DOM mutations (node insertions, mouse coordinates, and scroll events).

The analytics dashboard acts as a specialized environment that re-renders that exact DOM sequence. Because there is no open, cross-vendor standard for parsing and replaying these specific DOM mutation streams, data portability is virtually impossible. You cannot export a Smartlook recording and ingest it into another session replay tool.

Consequently, when the Smartlook servers are turned off, historical replay data, including documented UI bugs and user journeys, cannot be migrated.

Summary

The closure of Smartlook highlights a recurring technical challenge with cloud-hosted analytics platforms regarding data ownership and vendor lock-in.

As the May 2026 End of Sale date approaches, development and product teams relying on Smartlook will need to evaluate alternative analytics solutions. During this transition, it is important to factor in that historical session replay data will serve only as a temporary reference and will not transfer to a new provider.