IT sprawl is a challenge. Layers of technology systems and services create ever-deepening and widening estates, making it that much harder for managers, directors and executives to control, let alone comprehend enough to communicate value to other stakeholders.
Seventy-seven percent of technology leaders reported growing sprawl to Forrester in a 2024 survey, and in a more recent survey, 80% expressed concern that AI agents will worsen sprawl and complexity issues.
Still, these leaders know that resigning to the sprawl is not an option, says Monique Marais, Nexio's Executive Head: Hybrid Infrastructure.
"They are looking for ways to integrate and reduce complexities. There's a lot of things that can impact that. There's operational optimisation and also having better visibility of the overall environment. But if we step back, there is a bigger issue. Operational silos and increased complexity often result from attempts to address governance, cloud management, capacity and skills with multiple tools and processes. When IT leaders use tools that tackle sprawl, they complicate visibility and reporting."
The 'single pane of glass' red herring
Monitoring tools from vendors and third-party services already give IT teams insights into how areas in the estate behave. Yet, these also increase the noise, obfuscating answers. Simplicity has become the rallying cry. Monitoring solutions often tout the so-called 'single pane of glass'. But this is often more a marketing phrase than a practical reality.
"I don't like the phrase 'single pane of glass'. First, because different systems will have their own dashboards, and second, because dashboards and reporting tools vary between teams and what they look after. The higher up you go, the more those people have to rely on multiple dashboards or stitch together an overwhelming amount of information that reduces context," says Marais.
Context is the missing element in estate visibility. A dashboard may report a latency spike on a database, but the reason for that spike can result from networking, a backup job, perhaps even a momentary slump on public cloud services. Context dies when a monitoring strategy cannot consolidate governance, regulatory, compliance, operational capacity and performance management into a single operating model.
IT leaders need context
Monitoring tools and dashboards can only reveal so much before people have to dig around and find actionable answers. This lack of context complicates everything, from fast resolution to making ROI and budget presentations to the business.
IT leaders have invested in visibility and monitoring. What they want, says Marais, is to see the material benefits.
"When I asked one of my clients what they would like to see, his immediate answer was, 'A material benefit to the service that I'm getting.'" For this client in particular, he wants to see a cost saving, compliance with governance, and he also wants his team to take the time that they need to learn, to develop and to progress within their technology areas."
It's the old chestnut of keeping the lights on taking all the air out of the room, leaving little for strategic matters. The problem with monitoring sprawl is that it still doesn't give IT teams the room to breathe, contextualise and plan.
Less ticketing more outcomes
"Material benefit is the progression of the IT environment," says Marais. "We like to call this 'less ticketing, more outcomes'."
Monitoring tools are important, but not the ultimate answer, and the single pane of glass is more conceptual than practical. What can IT leaders do to fix this issue, bringing complexity and sprawl and control?
Marais encountered similar problems while managing Nexio's infrastructure, noting that while she had access to excellent individual services, she still ran into monitoring silos. Thus, she and her team developed a framework they now call Operate+. Its goal is to create accountability through outcomes-based services, allowing internal teams to focus on strategic objectives and learn.
"We needed one operating model and governance framework, run by people. The goal was not to chase problems but to focus on outcomes, and then identify and resolve issues in that way. The issue was that when we chased a single view or single truth, complexity always dictated behaviour. So we instead developed a structure that focuses on outcomes such as reliability and performance, linked to business objectives. The structure uses information from the monitoring tools across our systems. But it's the focus on outcomes that decides what we see and how we interpret things."
This technology-agnostic management approach, which Nexio now offers as a managed service, gets to the heart of why monitoring services don't get on top of sprawl, she concludes.
"I've not seen a single tool that does everything. There will always be multiple monitoring tools. The answer is a unified approach to the management of the systems, regardless of the technology stack. It's structured operational ownership that gives IT leaders a single point to get answers. Not from a dashboard, but from a person backed by a skilled team and supporting systems who take accountability and ownership of the outcomes-based services."
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