Humans have always used tools to help them achieve their goals. But in the digital era, this dynamic is often reversed. Our tools now inundate us with so much attention-demanding information, it can feel like they control us. This is especially true in the IT department, where juggling a vast array of monitoring products and solutions can be a constant headache for tech professionals. Let's take a closer look at the chaos of tool sprawl and how teams can take back control of their stack.
What Is Tool Sprawl?
As a company grows, so too does the demand for new technologies to manage different aspects of its operations. Today, over half (52%) of companies surveyed report using more than six observability tools, with 11% saying they use more than 16. These include solutions for infrastructure monitoring, application performance, log management, network performance, security information, cloud monitoring, digital experience, Kubernetes, website monitoring, database monitoring, and (believe it or not) more. Initially, each tool is adopted to solve a specific problem, but over time, the collective cost and complexity of managing these multiple tools can outweigh their individual benefits. Wasted resources and disjointed data systems occur when tools overlap in functionality but aren’t fully integrated. The shift towards hybrid cloud architectures complicates things further by creating visibility gaps and blind spots. Let’s look at three examples of tool sprawl in practice.
Sprawl Story: Overwhelmed by False Alerts
Emma is an IT Operations Manager at a mid-sized software company. She oversees the monitoring and maintenance of both on-premises data centers and several cloud-based services. To make sure everything runs smoothly, Emma's team uses various tools to monitor different elements of the hybrid environment. As the company expands, so does the complexity of its infrastructure. Emma finds that her team uses one set of tools for on-premises hardware monitoring, another for cloud services, and another for application performance monitoring. Each system has its own interface, alerting mechanism, and data analytics functionalities. This setup creates an overwhelming number of alerts, most of which are false positives or non-critical issues that distract the team from genuine problems. Stressed and frustrated, Emma and her team spend an outsized amount of time simply sorting through and categorizing alerts from different tools. Periods of downtime soon become a regular occurrence.
Sprawl Story: Hybrid IT Security Gaps
Alex is a Security Analyst for a financial services firm that relies on a hybrid IT environment to host its critical applications. Alex's team uses different sets of tools for the cloud environment and the on-premises data centers. This includes separate firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and compliance tracking tools. Each tool has its own configurations, capabilities, and reports. Unsurprisingly, Alex struggles to ensure consistent security policies across all environments, and the fragmentation complicates his ability to swiftly react to potential security threats. When a security breach is detected on the cloud infrastructure, it takes Alex's team a long time to respond because they have to manually correlate the data from different tools. The delay allows the breach to spread, increasing the severity of the incident.
Sprawl Story: Inefficiencies in Resource Management
Casey is the IT Director at a growing e-commerce company, managing a blend of on-premises servers and cloud resources. It is their job to ensure scalability while controlling costs as the company expands. Casey notices the company uses multiple tools with overlapping functionalities to manage cloud expenditures, virtual machine performance, and network monitoring. Each department independently adopts tools they are comfortable with, leading to redundancy and inefficiencies. This results in higher operational costs as the company pays for several tools that essentially serve the same purpose. Worse, these tools fail to provide a coherent picture of how the company uses resources, which makes it challenging for Casey to reach informed decisions about where to cut costs and where to invest.
The Antidote to Fragmentation
The stories above are diverse, but all lead back to the same issue: a lack of unity. Fragmentation, information overload, and the need to consult multiple sources to find the truth leave teams bewildered and overwhelmed. The complexity of the digital era requires a solution powerful enough to return cohesion to the IT environment. Full-stack observability offers a comprehensive understanding of system behavior across diverse and distributed environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud settings. This approach leverages advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, detect anomalies, and provide insights in real time. This means that issues can be predicted and prevented before they impact end users.
One Tool to Stop the Sprawl
With full-stack observability, Emma's team can use one interface to gain a holistic view of their entire infrastructure—both on-premises and cloud-based. Correlating and prioritizing alerts helps to weed out false positives, while AI-driven insights predict potential failures so that the team can focus on preemptive measures rather than simply reacting to crises. For Alex, a unified observability platform with security-focused features offers an integrated view of security postures across cloud and on-premises environments. He applies consistent security policies by consolidating firewalls, intrusion detection, and compliance reporting into one cohesive system. Advanced analytics facilitate real-time threat detection and automated response, lowering the risk of breaches spreading unaddressed. A unified observability solution addresses Casey's concerns by helping eliminate tool redundancy and providing a comprehensive view of how their organization utilizes resources. Now, Casey can monitor cloud expenditures, VM performance, and network health in one place. The outcome? Informed cost management decision-making driving business growth.
Everything in One Place
In a fragmented IT landscape where data streams from a host of sources, teams can find themselves at the mercy of their tools. The intricacies of today's digital world demand a comprehensive solution that can consolidate diverse components of our IT infrastructures and put everything back in one place. Is your team juggling a chaotic mix of monitoring and observability tools? Learn more about how SolarWinds leverages 25 years of experience to create AI-powered observability that lets you monitor everything from anywhere
