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Observability is undeniably one of the most important aspects of day-to-day IT operations. The ability to see the internal state of your infrastructure by gathering data on its health and performance gives you the power to fully grasp the nature of an issue and quickly fix it, even preemptively.
The three main pillars supporting observability are metrics, traces, and logs. Over the years, numerous specialized tools have emerged for gathering this data, catering to both the general industry and its various niches. The plethora of open-source, commercial, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and self-hosted options has led to many organizations mixing and matching solutions to fit their use cases.
This abundance brought a unique challenge to observability: tool fragmentation. Easy to miss, severe in consequences, and difficult to resolve once past the boiling point, it poses a big risk for companies of any size, shape, or structure.
This post discusses what tool fragmentation could mean for your business and how to tackle it before it’s too late.
Organizations seeking to master observability must choose the right tool stack. As seen in Checkmk’s SysAdmin Survey 2024, this is no easy task, with more than 80% of respondents saying their tools do not provide optimal value and overlap with other solutions in terms of functionality.
The Checkmk survey further revealed that over 51% of respondents are using between three and five monitoring tools in their organizations, while 9.8% report having six to ten. New Relic’s 2023 global survey, meanwhile, indicates that 11.3% of businesses use six monitoring tools and 28% have seven or more.
A company is using six, seven, or eight separate monitoring tools spread across departments when an incident occurs. Every department has a piece of information regarding their part of the system, be it a log, a trace, a set of metrics, or a notification from a triggered alert. Each branch of the business thus knows only a part of the truth and can either act on this subset of information or first consult with the others. The second approach will always yield much better results. However, achieving those results, i.e., consulting with others, can be a challenge due to tool fragmentation and the resulting limited observability.
A business can certainly say it has established “observability” and back up their efforts with a few instances of Kibana, Grafana, and Nagios. They can set up a couple of Better Stack uptime monitors, configure CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, and implement a few other popular tools. Such a wide network of tools, platforms, and monitors will indeed gather much useful information. However, it will be extremely hard to share, cross-reference, and thus use this data in any meaningful way. The amount of open log files, traces, dashboards, and data an operator can digest is already limited. Keeping that data in multiple separate locations leads to unavoidable blind spots, hindering full observability.
This is tool fragmentation in its purest form: putting much effort into managing a wide array of tools in use—all with different formats, data storage locations, user management methods, means of access, and even pricing models. Instead, organizations must focus on gathering clear, understandable insights, which, in turn, will facilitate quick and successful collaboration.
A web of tools, stakeholders, technologies, data silos, and dashboards is already difficult to escape. Unfortunately, over time, a fragmented observability stack will only get worse—not only losing its effectiveness but also severely amplifying all its drawbacks.
There are two proven methods to counter this problem.
Many various factors contribute to the formation of data silos. The natural growth of a business can cause departments to spread too wide; when this occurs without a proper technology ecosystem to facilitate easy information flow, these departments become isolated.
Lack of proper data governance can also cause multiple silos to pop up, as without a centralized policy, every department will follow its own set of rules.
Silos can also form due to rivalry or mismanagement. Teams focused on competing against one another instead of collaborating on a common goal quickly separate themselves from the rest of the business, and become disinterested in sharing insights.
Organizations should look to store their data in as few silos as possible, or not use any silos at all. Data siloing wastes employee time, causes security incidents, and, in general, is bad for business.
The entire concept of keeping things separate for each department of your company goes against the core principle of most modern methodologies: collaboration. This is emphasized especially by DevOps and DevSecOps, the most popular approaches in the industry today. These focus on building a culture of partnership and communication, thus promoting transparency and data sharing.
There are many ways of breaking down data silos and enhancing observability, depending on their origin:
Maintaining numerous tools, all gathering a small part of the whole picture, is not a true solution; it merely introduces more problems. Instead of providing insights, an overgrown toolkit obstructs visibility and further reinforces established silos.
Avoid picking up additional instruments for minor/partial use cases. This means reviewing your current stack to confirm it is not already equipped with sufficient capabilities for your needs. If new tools are required, make sure to ask the right questions when selecting one:
Although it seems logical to seek, for example, a PHP-specific monitoring tool for your PHP-based applications, simply because a tool is dedicated to PHP does not necessarily mean another tool cannot serve this purpose just as well. Nor does it mean that the insights it provides cannot be gathered with anything else.
To truly solve tool fragmentation, organizations must eliminate both data siloing and tool sprawl. And for this, they need a single, unified suite of interconnected services for complete observability. Such a solution allows companies to cross-examine data between sources, aggregate it, evaluate it, and use the gathered insights for effective decision-making.
Site24x7 is a comprehensive observability platform. Trusted by customers worldwide, Site24x7’s all-in-one monitoring caters to the modern organization’s need for meaningful insights across their application stack.
Site24x7’s all-in-one platform gives you control over your entire infrastructure—from monitoring websites, applications, servers, networks, and cloud infrastructure to log management, performance metrics, and real-user interactions. Most importantly, it allows for seamless integration across multiple platforms, environments, and ecosystems.
Site24x7 features over 100 plugins, support for all major cloud providers, and over 450 network hardware/software vendors. Additional features, such as AI-reinforced alerting, SLA management, and easy mobile access, will help you put observability issues to rest once and for all.
To learn more, sign up for a free 30-day trial or request a personalized quote.
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