Modern IT is complex, and it is no surprise that modern IT management is, too. Over the past two decades, the move to the cloud, microservices, and containers has powered modern IT, bringing great scale and efficiency at every level. With DevOps practices, CI/CD, and AIOps, modern IT has also achieved great strides in execution speed and agility. However, such complexity has also created observability challenges for IT teams.
IT teams are constantly searching for the best tools to meet various monitoring requirements, leaving them stuck with a cluttered and assorted tool set. Hardly acquired strategically, IT tool sets are often assembled ad hoc by disparate IT teams over the years to suit emerging requirements. Without long-term centralized planning, these accumulated monitoring tools create their own data silos in a situation that is commonly known as tool sprawl.
What is tool sprawl?
In IT management terms, tool sprawl is classified as a type of tech debt. Tech debt is what you owe to your future mess after resorting to quick fixes and shortcuts, accumulating disorder in the system that gets harder to solve every year. When newer resources join and older hands move out, an IT organization will eventually struggle in the face of tech debt if tool sprawl is not addressed systematically. Since “a worker is only as good as their tools,” when tool sprawl clouds the view of IT operations, even simple processes are delayed and fixes are shoddy due to ineffective tool usage.
A CNCF study published in 2022 on the hurdles in cloud-native observability found that over a quarter of respondents confessed to using 10 or more monitoring tools, and half admitted that multiple tool usage is the greatest challenge in observability. Tool sprawl is a direct result of unplanned mismanagement and neglect, and can lead to many disadvantages, including:
- Operational clutter and reduced visibility. Having more than one tool per use case leads to confusion, switching fatigue, redundancy, and forgotten tools.
- Bottlenecks from manual data transfers as teams sift through data silos, increasing the mean time to detect and respond to incidents.
- Unnecessary and avoidable cost overheads due to an overlap in tool features and hidden costs in licensing fine print.
- Alert fatigue and blame games that impact productivity and innovation due to a lack of standard practices, awareness, and adoption
- Disjointed data processing and unauthorized data sharing across tools, which may result in data privacy threats.
Why unify your monitoring toolkit?
There are many benefits to adopting a unified toolkit. These include:
Create a single source of truth
A modern, comprehensive IT observability platform can help create a single source of truth for all of your IT operations.
Avoid wasted time
A unified toolkit saves time and effort for the whole organization by eliminating isolated, disjointed data that is often double-processed.
Streamline your IT operations
Unifying your tool sprawl means tools are compatible, streamlining operations.
Gain centralized access to insights
A unified monitoring toolkit consolidates all insights on a single pane of glass, drastically improving IT efficiency and security.
How Site24x7 helps
Here are ways ManageEngine Site24x7 helps IT organizations optimize their observability tool set:
Reduce tool sprawl
Site24x7 comes with an ever-expanding and comprehensive monitoring tool set to suit your current and emerging needs.
Improve service level metrics
Site24x7 helps establish a comprehensive view of your entire IT infrastructure for correlating metrics and establishing baselines.
Effortless cloud-native scaling
Site24x7’s cloud-native observability is built to scale, delivering agility and flexibility to accommodate growth without affecting performance.
Simple training and onboarding
Training and onboarding is streamlined with Site24x7. The platform's free online training, paid training, and certification program can make you an expert in IT observability.
The role of AIOps
Leveraging Site24x7 AIOps along with tool consolidation helps derive the full potential of IT observability, driving up efficiency and streamlining automated processes.
Best practices in your tool consolidation journey
Here are some best industry practices for reducing tool sprawl:
Focus on productivity
When it comes to consolidating tool sprawl, adopt a holistic approach that prioritizes productivity over cost. Choose an easy-to-use and capable observability tool to ensure long term success.
Ditch the piecemeal approachy
Choose an observability solution that comes with end-to-end monitoring tools rather than trying to move to a diverse set of tools from different vendors. The more overheads and organizational complexities you retain, the more likely you are to feed another tool sprawl.
Observability over monitoring
In monitoring, alerts notify you of issues and you resolve them. With observability, you'll get insights about the cause of issues and its wider effect on your systems. Holistic observability goes beyond metrics, traces, and logs, covering security, user experience, and overall business impact.
Adopt a change mindset
Change begins when you step out of your comfort zone. It takes a system-wide reassessment to transform an organization's approach to IT tools.
Go minimalist
Less is more. Having a trim tool set helps establish a centralized approach to IT monitoring, facilitating greater productivity and improved issue remediation.
Nearly every IT organization has a level of tool sprawl as it grows. The challenge is in ensuring your monitoring tool set is manageable, up to date, robust, and free from redundancy. To eliminate tool sprawl, IT organizations need support from leadership, a thorough understanding of their monitoring needs, and an organization-wide commitment to bring change.
About Site24x7
Site24x7 is a unified monitoring solution that can replace your disparate IT monitoring tools. A comprehensive AI-powered observability platform, Site24x7 collects and converges observability insights from metrics, traces, and logs, to help you gain actionable insights on a single platform.
With centralized dashboards, flexible alerts, and detailed reports, Site24x7 helps visualize, analyze, and identify the root cause of incidents. Site24x7 observes your entire IT environment, including websites and servers, network and application performance, FinOps, and hosted status communication pages. With powerful AI-led analytics and forecasts, automated actions, and exhaustive integrations, Site24x7 serves as an indispensable tool for DevOps and IT managers to maintain a healthy, high-performing, and resilient IT ecosystem.