How an IT department unified its monitoring tools
Fragmented monitoring hinders visibility
In a large international group, the Information Systems Department (ISD) had around twenty IT monitoring tools. Over the years, each team (network, servers, applications, security, etc.) had adopted its own monitoring solution, in addition to the disparate tools chosen by subsidiaries in different countries and those inherited from the group's external growth. This proliferation of tools led to rising costs, operational complexity and fragmented visibility of the actual IT state. How did this IT department manage to reduce its IT costs and improve its quality of service? Here is its journey, from the initial challenges to the benefits seen after choosing to unify its monitoring tools with ServicePilot.
Before the unification project, IT monitoring was fragmented across multiple specialized software programs, making it difficult to obtain a coherent overview. Some critical failures went unnoticed until they impacted users because the monitoring data was scattered. This situation, where "data is everywhere, but real visibility is lacking", hampered the teams' responsiveness. The result: wasted time juggling between consoles and difficulties correlating symptoms from different domains. These "siloed tools" led to slower incident response, with disconnected observability creating duplication of effort and delaying problem resolution. The company thus suffered from blind spots in monitoring — systemic problems could go unnoticed due to the lack of a unified view — and duplicate alerts that added noise rather than helping with decision-making.
Ensuring 99.99% availability requires a consolidated view
The IT department had very high availability targets for strategic applications, aiming for the famous "four nines" (99.99% availability). To give an idea, 99.99% availability allows for only about 4 minutes of downtime per month (less than one hour of downtime per year). Achieving such a level of service with a myriad of heterogeneous tools was a daunting task. Indeed, ensuring near-total availability requires proactively detecting and resolving even the smallest incident before it causes a service interruption.
However, without a consolidated view, it is difficult to quickly identify the root cause of a performance degradation. A concrete example: an application failure can be caused by a network component, a faulty server or an expired certificate—all of which were monitored by separate tools. Every minute spent piecing together metrics from different dashboards potentially prolonged the downtime.
That's why the IT department concluded that to meet its 99.99% SLA, it needed to unify monitoring in a central tool offering a global view. Industry experts advise reducing the proliferation of tools to improve reliability: achieving high availability does not require dozens of tools; on the contrary, the proliferation of tools must be minimized. In short, consolidating monitoring data into a single platform helps identify weak signals more quickly and intervene before problems affect users. Unified monitoring was therefore a prerequisite for maintaining irreproachable availability.
Choosing a single tool to replace disparate solutions
Based on this observation, the IT department launched a project to streamline monitoring tools. The goal: to replace multiple solutions with a single platform capable of monitoring everything from the network to applications, including the cloud and security. After conducting market research, the choice landed on ServicePilot, a unified monitoring and observability tool covering the entire IT system. This decision was part of a fundamental trend within the IT department: to eliminate the proliferation of redundant software. The aim was to consolidate fragmented monitoring tools into a unified platform. By replacing several specialized products (network monitoring, APM, servers, cloud, log analysis, etc.) with ServicePilot, the IT department sought to radically simplify its ecosystem.
The teams were able to redesign the monitoring of their information system using ServicePilot concepts to benefit from maps, standard dashboards, and new alert rules, while gradually deactivating the old tools. Although a change of this magnitude can be tricky, the simplicity of implementation of the solution allowed for smooth adoption. ServicePilot was deployed in parallel in just a few days, allowing the IT teams to make the transition in a matter of weeks, depending on the specific features of each migrated tool. The software quickly became the central point of monitoring once the teams' confidence had been established. The result: where several isolated consoles coexisted, the company now has a single control screen ("single pane of glass") aggregating all performance and availability indicators.
Greater operational efficiency through IT team synergy
The unification of tools has had a significant impact on the organization of IT teams. Previously, each team worked in isolation with its own tools and indicators, which perpetuated a silo culture. Now, with a common platform, the different specialties (network, systems, DevOps, etc.) share the same methodology and the same source of information. This shared view has fostered real synergy between IT teams. In crisis meetings, everyone looks at the same ServicePilot dashboards, which facilitates collaborative incident diagnosis. There is no longer any need for each team to defend the validity of its tool; the data is unified and authoritative for all.
The benefits of this increased collaboration are manifold. On the one hand, problems are resolved more quickly because everyone can contribute their expertise using the same central tool. On the other hand, it has broken the cycle of "passing the buck" between teams: when an incident occurs, there is no more ping-pong of responsibilities because everyone can see the entire service chain. Correlating all performance data within a single tool greatly simplifies the analysis of incident causes and "breaks down IT silos by promoting collaboration" between professionals. In concrete terms, the IT department has seen an improvement in operational efficiency: experts who were previously compartmentalized now work together, optimizing the use of resources and skills. Sharing a common platform has also standardized practices and vocabulary around monitoring, making exchanges more fluid.
Fewer false positives thanks to smarter correlations
One of the major problems with the multitude of previous tools was the constant noise of alerts. Each system generated its own notifications, often for the same event, without coordination. For example, a database failure could trigger an application-side alert (query error), an infrastructure alert (server error), and a network-side alert (port unreachable). Without intelligent correlation, these isolated tools sent a storm of redundant alerts for a single incident. Monitoring teams then had to manually sort through and cross-check the information to understand the root cause of the problem, which was time-consuming and risked drowning critical alerts in noise.
By unifying monitoring with ServicePilot, the IT department was able to drastically reduce these false positives. The platform integrates advanced alert correlation algorithms, allowing relevant notifications to be grouped together and redundancies to be filtered out. Teams can thus focus on real incidents, improving their efficiency and reducing the average resolution time.
Cost reduction and improved customer perception
This project has had a significant positive impact on costs and user satisfaction. By streamlining everything with ServicePilot, the company has been able to drastically reduce its TCO (total cost of ownership). The IT department estimates that the return on investment is rapid: not only have the direct tooling costs fallen, but increased operational efficiency has reduced losses related to incidents and downtime.
In terms of improving customer perception, whether for internal customers (business users) or external customers, the IT department has gained credibility. Increased stability and fewer visible outages have improved end-user satisfaction. Unified, proactive monitoring translates into less downtime and better performance, which strengthens business confidence in IT.
Finally, this project had a positive impact on the image of the IT department itself within the company. By successfully consolidating the tools, the IT department demonstrated its ability to innovate and optimize resources. The IT department has gone from being a cost center prone to incidents to a reliable strategic partner, thanks to a more resilient and efficient IT system. By unifying monitoring tools with ServicePilot, this IT department not only reduced its IT costs, but also laid the foundations for a more agile and responsive organization, benefiting users and the overall performance of the company. The lessons from this success can inspire any IT management team looking to do better with less: sometimes, fewer tools are better. The facts show that a well-chosen unified platform can deliver both substantial savings and improved service. It's a real win-win for the IT department and all the group's employees, whose activities are increasingly dependent on IT and with which performance is intrinsically linked.
