IT tool consolidation is essential, says new survey
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Munich, February 6, 2024 — Too many tools drive up effort and costs, this is one major finding of the "SysAdmin Day: Consolidating IT Tools" survey being released by the IT monitoring solution provider Checkmk today.
71% of IT professionals opt for fewer tools
Driven by the rapid pace of digitization and the need to provide a secure, stable and highly flexible IT environment, most IT professionals have an arsenal of infrastructure management tools at hand. According to the survey, one in two organizations uses between three and five different tools just for monitoring. As a result, 71% of IT professionals surveyed see an acute need for consolidation. Top reasons cited are overlapping functionality as well as a lack of use and efficiency. Approximately 60% of respondents want to save costs through consolidation, while for 80% even more important is to cut down maintenance effort and thus to reduce their own workload by using fewer tools.
Cloud and containers on the rise
The study also shows that containers (57%) and cloud migration (50%) continue to be pivotal in modernizing the IT infrastructure. This reinforces the ongoing need of IT professionals to adapt to a changing role profile and learn new technologies. Despite increasing cloud adoption, almost all respondents agree that they do not want to move all infrastructure resources to the public cloud.
Some 81% prefer hybrid IT landscapes, with only 1% opting for a cloud-only strategy and 17% favoring local IT infrastructure as the sole and central mode of operation.
Hybrid operating models continue to play a key strategic role in successful digital transformation. Many organizations, however, have not yet been able to define a set of tools to create operational and service consistency across both worlds.
Increasing demands on hybrid IT monitoring
When it comes to IT monitoring, some 89% of IT professionals expect the ability to monitor container environments to become "much more important" or "more important", respectively. Application performance monitoring/APM (86%), cloud monitoring (84%) and log monitoring (75%) are the runners-up. However, this increased importance is not at the expense of local infrastructure monitoring; rather, the data reflects the current shift to a hybrid IT infrastructure that increasingly uses cloud-native architectures such as Kubernetes or cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Microsoft Azure along with on-prem infrastructure.
Conclusion: Potential for cost savings and efficiency gains still untapped
Having more tools to manage IT infrastructure does not necessarily mean being better equipped to meet demands — quite the opposite:
Many organizations are not yet leveraging the potential of tool consolidation, which would allow their IT professionals to operate more efficiently and to save costs, even though solutions such as Checkmk already bundle all aspects of hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring in one tool.
About the survey
For the "SysAdmin Day: Consolidating IT Tools" report, IT monitoring specialist Checkmk surveyed 92 system administrators and DevOps engineers in Europe and North America online about their use of tools and technologies, as well as key trends in IT infrastructure management. The majority of participants has more than eleven years of professional experience and comes from companies with between 100 and 499 employees (28%) and with more than 500 employees (48%).
Media contact
Checkmk GmbH
press@checkmk.com
Tel: +49 89 998209700
Further information
About Checkmk
Checkmk’s mission is to enable IT infrastructures and applications to run in any organization at peak performance. That’s why we built Checkmk, the monitoring platform for every aspect of modern IT environments.
Checkmk is the platform of your open observability ecosystem. It combines enterprise-grade scalability and security with the extensibility of open source software. It integrates seamlessly with other enterprise applications and provides powerful features to automate monitoring workflows.
Tens of thousands of users in more than 50 countries rely on Checkmk to ensure high availability and best performance of their systems. With Checkmk, organizations prevent issues before they happen or trigger fast remediation actions when failures occur.
