But somewhere along the way, the mission of observability—clarity, connection, and confidence—gets lost. What started as a strategy for resilience becomes a tangle of overlapping tools, disconnected workflows, and unclear ROI. This is what happens when observability becomes an unchecked expense rather than a strategic investment.
And the data suggests it's a growing concern.
The Hidden Cost of Tool Overkill
According to the 2025 SolarWinds IT Trends Report, nearly two-thirds of surveyed IT professionals (64%) spend between 11% and 30% of their total IT budgets just addressing issues and service disruptions. Meanwhile, 10% of teams say they spend more than half their time resolving critical issues, leaving little bandwidth for innovation, automation, or process improvement. These stats don’t point to underinvestment in tooling—they point to misaligned investment. And here’s the catch: 87% of respondents say they’re confident in their tech stack. But confidence doesn’t equal cohesion. You can have best-in-class tools and still end up with fragmented visibility, redundant telemetry, and reactive incident response.
In a recent article, SolarWinds Senior Director of Product Marketing RJ Gazarek notes: “In today’s highly commoditized market, organizations often address problems with technology but fail to create the conditions in which tools can be effective. When these solutions don’t fix the issue, IT leaders are stumped. The truth is, we frequently underestimate the significance of the workflows and teams these tools are designed to assist.”
Resilience Starts with Smarter Spending
The most forward-looking teams are changing course. Instead of layering more tools onto already overloaded workflows, they’re simplifying their environment. They're asking sharper questions:
- What are we really using, and what’s shelfware?
- Where is data being duplicated, or worse, ignored?
- How can we reduce complexity without losing visibility?
These teams are shifting budget away from firefighting and into prevention. They’re not spending more, they’re spending smarter.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Consolidating tools around a single pane of glass
- Investing in solutions that unify cloud and on-prem visibility
- Focusing on signals, not noise
- Using observability to unlock workflow automation and cross-team collaboration
- Tying performance monitoring to business impact, not just technical uptime
Simplification isn’t just a cost-saving strategy; it’s a resilience multiplier. As Cullen Childress, chief product officer at SolarWinds, puts it: “If you’re investing in tooling, a single pane of glass on top of one data platform analyzing telemetry across your entire infrastructure may be cheaper than having 12 different tools. If you pay for a more premium offering to maximize operational resilience, you may be able to re-vector talent to other areas of your organization.”
Time Is the Hidden Metric
Tool overkill drains budget and burns time. Take the following example from RJ Gazarek:
“Imagine a marketing agency facing declining project completion rates. Frustrated, the leadership team decides to implement a new project management software, believing it will resolve their efficiency issues. Excited about the tech solution, they skip a thorough evaluation of the team's dynamics and workflows. After a few months, the staff still struggles with delays. Instead of improving collaboration, the software overwhelms them with notifications and complex features. The team discovers that the real issues stem from unclear roles and unresolved interpersonal conflicts, not inadequate technology. By now, however, precious time and resources have been lost.”
According to the IT Trends Report, 70% of resilient IT teams spend less than 25% of their time resolving critical issues. They’ve clawed back hours to invest in better workflows, team enablement, and future-proofing. Meanwhile, the 10% who spend most of their time in crisis mode also report higher budget consumption and lower job satisfaction. The report warns: “Dedicating that much time toward reacting to issues leaves little room for proactivity.” Teams are stuck in a loop: more tools, more alerts, more strain. The takeaway? True observability isn’t about how much tooling you have. It’s about how much time and clarity you gain from it.
From Accumulation to Alignment
The goal isn’t to eliminate tooling, it’s to align it. That means choosing platforms that scale with your environment, support your operational workflows, and offer meaningful visibility across the stack without drowning your teams in noise. It also means recognizing observability as more than a technical exercise. When done right, it informs spending decisions, supports service-level objectives, and helps organizations anticipate rather than react.
Remember, more dashboards won’t make your business more resilient, more alerts won’t make your team more efficient, and more tools won’t guarantee better outcomes. Success in observability and operational resilience comes from focus. Streamline the noise, align your investments, and empower your teams with clarity. You don’t need to see everything; you need to see what matters and act on it with precision.
Want to recap on the five most common barriers to real observability? Find Eoin’s complete series here.
