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Businesses Are Double-Invested in Monitoring – and Leaders Don't See It

Phil Tee

Our digital economy is intolerant of downtime. But consumers haven't just come to expect always-on digital apps and services. They also expect continuous innovation, new functionality and lightening fast response times.


Organizations have taken note, investing heavily in teams and tools that supposedly increase uptime and free resources for innovation. But leaders have not realized this "throw money at the problem" approach to monitoring is burning through resources without much improvement in availability outcomes.

The Moogsoft State of Availability Report — which helps engineering teams and leaders uncover insights about availability KPIs, teams and tools — found that businesses are double-investing in monitoring. Organizations spend too much money on too many tools, and teams spend the majority of their days monitoring their monitoring tools.

This over-investment in incident management goes largely unnoticed by management. So does the fact that monitoring cycles siphon resources from the future-driven work that delights customers and keeps engineers engaged.

We identify a few common causes of the spend for less approach here:

1. Sprawling single-domain monitoring tools

In a noble attempt to keep digital apps and services available to end users at all times, business leaders buy tools that monitor their increasingly large and complex IT infrastructures. In theory, these tools should speed fixes to performance-affecting issues by continuously scanning systems and notifying engineers about anomalies.

The problem is: Teams have far too many tools. On average, engineers manage 16 monitoring tools. And that number can creep up to 40 as SLAs increase. Sprawling tools like this are unwieldy and license, management and maintenance overheads are expensive. But the over-investment in monitoring doesn't stop there.

2. Days spend in monitoring cycles

IT monitoring tools should bear the brunt of monitoring itself. In principle, these tools relieve engineers from spending too much time on a fairly tedious task and enable them to deliver what customers want: bigger and better technology.

Unfortunately, teams spend by far the most time monitoring over any other task. Why? Engineers spin their wheels managing single-domain tools that are not integrated cross stack. and produce huge volumes of largely useless data. Teams facing a critical outage or incident waste valuable time investigating data from disparate tools and connecting the dots themselves.

3. Leadership-team misalignment

Business leaders do not see just how much time their teams spend on monitoring, and likely believe they're making sound monitoring investments. Leaders believe their teams spend about the same amount of their time on monitoring as they do on other daily (and often future-driven) responsibilities like automation, cloud transformation and development.

4. Stalling innovation and experimentation

With engineering teams stuck in monitoring cycles, something has to give. And unfortunately, that thing is innovation and experimentation — the very activities that delight customers and engage engineering teams. In other words, not only do organizations over-invest in monitoring, they do so to the detriment of customer experience improvements.

The solution: steps to tech stability

If you are part of an engineering team or team leader, chances are you're facing modern-day monitoring problems. Consider these best practices for breaking wasteful monitoring cycles and building your tech stability:

1. Baseline your tools. Audit your existing tools, understand their utilization and what they cost. Then, you can determine which of these assets advance availability goals and which just create more noise.

2. Consolidate your tools. Hold on to only those monitoring tools that provide value. Otherwise, try to shrink your monitoring tools' footprint to decrease total cost of ownership (TCO) and reduce noise.

3. Implement an artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) solution. Make your next monitoring investment one that makes engineer's jobs less toilsome, not more. AIOps connects cloud and on-prem monitoring tools, giving engineers a central system of engagement for all monitoring activities. The platform alerts engineers to data anomalies and their root cause and automates the entire incident lifecycle.

4. Pay down your technical debt. With time back on your side, tackle the most relevant tech debt and increase system stability. Free even more time by automating away toil and continue to increase availability with chaos engineering.

5. Invest in the future. With time and money saved, refocus your investments on company-differentiating initiatives.

Monitoring tools are essential to uptime. But monitoring cannot be the only thing teams do — especially when it hinders innovation and experimentation. Leaders must make more informed investments to monitor more effectively. Only then can organizations move from maintaining the customer experience to innovating the customer experience.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

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Businesses Are Double-Invested in Monitoring – and Leaders Don't See It

Phil Tee

Our digital economy is intolerant of downtime. But consumers haven't just come to expect always-on digital apps and services. They also expect continuous innovation, new functionality and lightening fast response times.


Organizations have taken note, investing heavily in teams and tools that supposedly increase uptime and free resources for innovation. But leaders have not realized this "throw money at the problem" approach to monitoring is burning through resources without much improvement in availability outcomes.

The Moogsoft State of Availability Report — which helps engineering teams and leaders uncover insights about availability KPIs, teams and tools — found that businesses are double-investing in monitoring. Organizations spend too much money on too many tools, and teams spend the majority of their days monitoring their monitoring tools.

This over-investment in incident management goes largely unnoticed by management. So does the fact that monitoring cycles siphon resources from the future-driven work that delights customers and keeps engineers engaged.

We identify a few common causes of the spend for less approach here:

1. Sprawling single-domain monitoring tools

In a noble attempt to keep digital apps and services available to end users at all times, business leaders buy tools that monitor their increasingly large and complex IT infrastructures. In theory, these tools should speed fixes to performance-affecting issues by continuously scanning systems and notifying engineers about anomalies.

The problem is: Teams have far too many tools. On average, engineers manage 16 monitoring tools. And that number can creep up to 40 as SLAs increase. Sprawling tools like this are unwieldy and license, management and maintenance overheads are expensive. But the over-investment in monitoring doesn't stop there.

2. Days spend in monitoring cycles

IT monitoring tools should bear the brunt of monitoring itself. In principle, these tools relieve engineers from spending too much time on a fairly tedious task and enable them to deliver what customers want: bigger and better technology.

Unfortunately, teams spend by far the most time monitoring over any other task. Why? Engineers spin their wheels managing single-domain tools that are not integrated cross stack. and produce huge volumes of largely useless data. Teams facing a critical outage or incident waste valuable time investigating data from disparate tools and connecting the dots themselves.

3. Leadership-team misalignment

Business leaders do not see just how much time their teams spend on monitoring, and likely believe they're making sound monitoring investments. Leaders believe their teams spend about the same amount of their time on monitoring as they do on other daily (and often future-driven) responsibilities like automation, cloud transformation and development.

4. Stalling innovation and experimentation

With engineering teams stuck in monitoring cycles, something has to give. And unfortunately, that thing is innovation and experimentation — the very activities that delight customers and engage engineering teams. In other words, not only do organizations over-invest in monitoring, they do so to the detriment of customer experience improvements.

The solution: steps to tech stability

If you are part of an engineering team or team leader, chances are you're facing modern-day monitoring problems. Consider these best practices for breaking wasteful monitoring cycles and building your tech stability:

1. Baseline your tools. Audit your existing tools, understand their utilization and what they cost. Then, you can determine which of these assets advance availability goals and which just create more noise.

2. Consolidate your tools. Hold on to only those monitoring tools that provide value. Otherwise, try to shrink your monitoring tools' footprint to decrease total cost of ownership (TCO) and reduce noise.

3. Implement an artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) solution. Make your next monitoring investment one that makes engineer's jobs less toilsome, not more. AIOps connects cloud and on-prem monitoring tools, giving engineers a central system of engagement for all monitoring activities. The platform alerts engineers to data anomalies and their root cause and automates the entire incident lifecycle.

4. Pay down your technical debt. With time back on your side, tackle the most relevant tech debt and increase system stability. Free even more time by automating away toil and continue to increase availability with chaos engineering.

5. Invest in the future. With time and money saved, refocus your investments on company-differentiating initiatives.

Monitoring tools are essential to uptime. But monitoring cannot be the only thing teams do — especially when it hinders innovation and experimentation. Leaders must make more informed investments to monitor more effectively. Only then can organizations move from maintaining the customer experience to innovating the customer experience.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...