The drive to consolidate observability tools is everywhere.
On paper, it’s a no-brainer: slash licensing fees, simplify your stack, and give your exhausted operations teams a break.
But in practice, these initiatives often fall flat. They get bogged down, fail to realise their cost-saving goals, and, worse, can even increase risk by creating new visibility gaps.
The fundamental mistake? Starting with the tools themselves.
Experience—backed by industry analysis from firms like Gartner—shows us there’s a better way. The key to successful, value-driven consolidation isn’t about eliminating tools first; it’s about taming the tsunami of noise they create.
It’s about creating a single source of truth that allows you to make intelligent, data-driven decisions about your tooling landscape.
This is our 101 guide to getting it right, framed by the dotslash Service Operations Framework.
Before you can rationalise anything, you need to understand the reality of your current operations.
In our framework, this is the Assess phase. For tool consolidation, this doesn’t mean creating a spreadsheet of tools and their costs—it means understanding the data.
Your first move should be to deploy the Event Management Platform. This is the central brain that sits in the middle of your entire monitoring ecosystem.
Its job is to:
By starting with an Event Management Platform, you achieve two critical goals for the Assess phase:
| Benefit | Description |
| Immediate Value | Gartner reports that organisations see event noise reduction between 33% and 97% within three months. This gives your I&O teams immediate relief and improves core metrics like MTTR. |
| True Baseline | For the first time, you can see clearly which systems are generating noise, where your monitoring capabilities overlap, and, most importantly, where the real gaps are. |
This is a counter-intuitive first step—you’re temporarily adding a tool—but you’re doing so to gain the intelligence needed to make the right decisions later.
With a clear, correlated view of your event data, you can now move to the Design phase.
Here, you’ll architect your future-state observability model, moving beyond just events to consolidate other telemetry like metrics and logs.
The goal is to design a holistic data model that enriches your incidents.
For example:
By correlating specific performance metrics and log entries with an incident, you give your SRE and application teams the context they need to diagnose and resolve issues faster.
This is the point where you answer critical questions such as:
Armed with a clear design, you can finally enter the Build phase.
This is the point—and only at this point—where you begin to decommission tools.
Because you’ve followed a data-driven process, you can now act with confidence.
The decisions are no longer based on guesswork or which contract happens to be up for renewal. You are making informed choices to:
| Action | Description |
| Decommission redundant tools | That provide overlapping or low-value data. |
| Consolidate capabilities | Onto a single platform where it makes sense. |
| Re-invest savings | Into addressing the critical visibility gaps you identified back in the Assess phase. |
By following this process, tool consolidation becomes the logical, low-risk outcome of a mature observability strategy – not a frantic, high-risk cost-cutting exercise.
You move from a state of reactive noise to one of proactive, intelligent, and efficient operations – the final Operate phase.