IT monitoring tool sprawl refers to the proliferation of multiple monitoring tools within an organization’s IT infrastructure. While monitoring tools are essential for maintaining the performance, availability, and security of IT systems, their excessive use can have negative impacts on business operations. Though the initial objective of prioritizing security was a step in the right direction, adopting new tech and an unnecessarily high number of IT tools wastes money and opportunities. With tool sprawl, each tool has the potential to cause a data silo, which requires frequent data translation between utilities, causing bottlenecks and other obstacles to development.
Here are some ways in which infrastructure monitoring tool sprawl can affect businesses:
- Increased Complexity: The use of multiple monitoring tools introduces complexity into the IT environment. Each tool may have its own configuration, interface, and reporting mechanisms, making it difficult to maintain and manage the overall monitoring infrastructure. This complexity can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and increased operational overhead.
- Higher Costs: With each additional monitoring tool, there are associated costs such as licensing fees, maintenance expenses, and staff training. The more tools in use, the higher the financial burden on the organization. Additionally, if the tools don’t integrate well with each other, additional effort and resources may be required to consolidate and analyze data from multiple sources.
- Fragmented Visibility: When different monitoring tools are used in silos, it becomes challenging to get a holistic view of the entire infrastructure. This leads to a loss of operational efficiency from having to pull data from various sources. This lack of visibility can result in blind spots, making it difficult to identify and diagnose issues that span across different systems or layers of the IT stack. It may also impede effective troubleshooting and root cause analysis, leading to prolonged downtime and slower incident resolution.
- Monitoring Tool Redundancy: In some cases, different monitoring tools may offer similar or overlapping functionalities. This redundancy can create confusion and make it harder for IT teams to determine which tool to rely on for specific monitoring tasks. Redundant tools also increase the chances of inconsistent monitoring practices, leading to potential gaps or duplications in monitoring coverage.
- Performance Impact: Some monitoring tools consume system resources such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth. When multiple monitoring tools are deployed simultaneously, especially if they are resource-intensive, they can put a strain on the infrastructure they are meant to monitor. This can lead to performance degradation, affecting the overall responsiveness and stability of critical systems.
- Operational Inefficiencies: Managing multiple monitoring tools often requires IT teams to learn and navigate various interfaces, workflows, and processes. This can result in inefficiencies, as administrators need to switch between different tools and contexts. Additionally, the time spent on maintaining and configuring multiple tools could be better utilized in other value-added activities.
To mitigate the negative impact of infrastructure monitoring tool sprawl, organizations should consider implementing a comprehensive monitoring strategy. This involves evaluating and consolidating tools where possible, ensuring compatibility and integration between different tools, and defining clear monitoring requirements and objectives. By rationalizing the monitoring tool landscape, organizations can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance overall visibility and performance monitoring capabilities.
ODIN 360 Infrastructure Monitoring
Alvaka’s infrastructure monitoring solution, ODIN 360, helps solve the challenge of tool sprawl with 360-degree visibility, a unified platform, hybrid solutions, and seamless workflow integrations. ODIN 360 offers 24×7 monitoring provided by US-based staff and serves as a single source of truth for your IT environment.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.