What is monitoring sprawl and what to do about it?

If troubleshooting looks like: teams scrambling, everyone using different tools‌ and data everywhere — you’re dealing with monitoring sprawl.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the root causes of this “urban sprawl” of monitoring tools. We’ll examine why isolated monitoring approaches fail in modern IT landscapes and share strategies to break down silos, empowering better visibility of your data and systems. Understanding and addressing monitoring sprawl is crucial for any organization striving for resilience in a world of increasingly complex infrastructure.

Monitoring sprawl explained

Picture it: a website outage is in progress. Your customers are unable to log into your web application. The company has stopped. The engineers are all trying to pinpoint the root cause of the issue. Because each of them work on a different team and on a different technology stack, they have all brought their own tools to the party. Now, they are trying to correlate the data in their tool with the information in the other tools, to piece together the complete picture. You wonder how you ever got here. This situation is described with the term “monitoring sprawl.”

How does monitoring sprawl arise?

Monitoring sprawl is like urban sprawl. It describes a situation where things have changed over time to create a chaotic and random situation without any clear structure or reason. If your working environment feels the same, you are not alone. 

Different tools and technologies appear in any growing technology organization. Even if the work they do is, on the surface, very similar, every department has their tooling preferences. These can be personal preferences (“Bob prefers open source tools”) or driven by technology choices (“Microsoft technology is best monitored with Microsoft tools”). Sometimes rules and regulations or business considerations may even drive them (“This monitoring tool comes for free with our enterprise license”). 

Why is monitoring sprawl a problem for IT teams?

As long as you consider each department in isolation, there is nothing wrong with this situation. So what if the database team uses their own monitoring tool that is different from the others? The right tool for the right job, right? Sure, if all you have to worry about is your own piece of the puzzle, then you’re fine. 

This breaks down when you realize that IT systems these days cross silo boundaries and rely on lots of technical components to do their job. If you need to understand what is happening in your area, you’ll need to combine and connect information from your different silos and tools. This makes it very hard. Meanwhile, your customers don’t care how you’ve organized your IT systems. They just want your service to work so they can get their job done.

Thinking about a solution

Making sense of complex IT landscapes is a difficult and specialized job that requires piecing together data from the separate technology silos. It requires intimate knowledge of each tool and how the information in there can be extracted. It requires establishing a common vocabulary so that ‌information from the separate tools can be related to each other. It requires a tool that can scale to handle all the combined information. And it requires a tool that makes it easy to monitor and troubleshoot issues in your IT landscape. 

Fortunately, we at SUSE have already done the hard work for you. We defined a common vocabulary called our data model, so all sources of information speak the same language. We built 80+ integrations with the most common infrastructure and monitoring tools available. SUSE Cloud Observability’s full-stack observability is built on scalable open source technology and scales to the enterprise level. Our unique GUI and artificial intelligence combines topology, data‌ and time to make it easy and flexible to find what’s wrong and what to do about it.

Simplify IT observability with SUSE Cloud Observability

If you’re ready to tackle monitoring sprawl and transform your organization’s IT observability, head over to the AWS Marketplace for a free trial or download our how-to-guide for more details.