Why Consolidating Observability Tools Is a Smart Move
As more aspects of a business become digital and more complex, observability has gone from a nice-to-have to an absolute must. It keeps systems running smoothly, users happy, and business moving forward. But let’s be honest — you’re probably feeling some strain if you’re relying on a patchwork of tools to monitor Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT).
Enterprise organizations are centralizing observability efforts and realizing that fragmented observability tools that initially seem manageable are showing cracks. Data silos, operational headaches, lack of standards, integration complexity, and ballooning costs are just a few of the challenges that come with the growth of observability tools. It’s like trying to fix a leaky pipe with duct tape — inefficient, increasingly costly, and not exactly foolproof.
Observability Costs: The Elephant in the Room
Observability isn’t just complex — it’s expensive. In 2022, Datadog revealed during an earnings call that a single customer spent $65 million annually on observability tools. This figure sparked a conversation about rising costs and the sustainability of current approaches.
One observer pointed out that some vendors suggest allocating up to 30% of total infrastructure costs to observability tools. That’s an unsustainable cost for many organizations. While ensuring system resilience is critical, the financial strain of fragmented observability tools limits investments in other areas, forcing teams to make trade-offs that could compromise overall performance.
In 2025, more organizations will look for ways to mitigate costs by being more cautious about what applications require the full power of an observability platform, exploring open-source and lower-cost commercial alternatives, refining their cost estimation and budgeting processes, and negotiating favorable terms with existing vendors.
Simplify, Streamline, Succeed
The 2024 SRE report found that many large enterprises use more than five Application Performance Management (APM) tools to monitor their IT infrastructure.
Fragmented tools make troubleshooting harder, slow teams down, and inflate costs. Consolidation offers a clear path forward, enabling organizations to centralize their observability efforts and optimize workflows. A unified observability platform doesn’t just simplify processes; it breaks down silos, accelerates resolution times, and enhances collaboration.
Open standards like Open Telemetry further amplify the benefits, allowing teams to integrate diverse systems without being locked into a single vendor. This flexibility ensures that observability strategies remain future-proof as infrastructure evolves.
Consider the findings from the Airline Benchmark Report: Companies that embraced consolidated, modernized observability solutions experienced fewer service disruptions and quicker recovery times. These organizations weren’t just monitoring performance; they were actively engineering resilience.
The Challenges of Over-Reliance on MELT
But here’s the rub: Traditional observability models only give you part of the picture. They have been using APM platforms focusing on MELT because that’s what the industry has been doing for the last 30 years. IT Ops teams are often drowning in data and are still blind. We seem to believe that we would find the answer if we could only get more data, more logs, more metrics. But what if the problem is not the amount of data, but that we are looking at the wrong data for the answer?
Sure, MELT is great for tracking internal application metrics, but in today’s world, most applications are hybrid, service-oriented, and distributed, which requires visibility into their dependencies, including connectivity, ISPs, cloud services, third-party APIs, CDNs, etc. These external factors all play a critical role in ensuring smooth user experiences but often fall outside the purview of traditional observability stacks.
Modern observability teams combine their traditional APM tools with Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) to gain the outside-in perspective necessary to understand real-world customer experience and manage external dependencies effectively. When paired with APM, IPM equips teams with complete visibility to detect and address issues proactively.
The Trend Towards Centralized Observability Governance
A growing trend in large enterprises is creating a central monitoring team that serves multiple company divisions, or at least provides guidance, best practices, and governance to distributed monitoring and observability teams.
Moving Forward
The shift from a tactical MELT-driven approach to a broader, modern observability strategy requires a mindset shift. By focusing on consolidation, centralized governance, and complete visibility across both the application and the internet stack, you’re improving system reliability and setting your team up for long-term success. After all, observability isn’t just about catching issues — it’s about delivering exceptional digital experiences every single time.
This is the last trend we want to touch on in this article: The emergence of eXperience Level Objectives (XLOs), which focus not on system-level SLIs or vendor SLAs, but on the experience users get from the applications and services that IT is responsible for. Adopting XLOs can help bridge the gap between IT and the business and show the value that IT operations teams bring in a much more tangible way.
It’s time to abandon fragmented tools and embrace a smarter, more unified approach to observability. The payoff? Happier users, a more efficient team, and the confidence that your systems can handle whatever comes next.
