With the rapid growth of data, sprawling hybrid cloud environments, and ongoing business demands, today’s IT landscape demands more than troubleshooting. Successful IT leaders are proactive, aligning technology with business objectives to transform their IT departments into growth engines.

At our recent LogicMonitor Analyst Council in Austin, TX, Chief Customer Officer Julie Solliday led a fireside chat with IT leaders across healthcare, finance, and entertainment. Their insights highlight strategies any organization can adopt to turn IT complexity into business value. Here are five key takeaways:

1. Business value first: Align IT with core organizational goals

Rafik Hanna, SVP at Topgolf, emphasizes, “The number one thing is business value.” For Hanna, every tool, and every process, must directly enhance the player experience. As an entertainment destination, Topgolf’s success depends on delivering superior experiences that differentiate them from competitors and drive continued business growth. This focus on outcomes serves as a reminder for IT leaders to ask:

• How does this initiative impact our core business objectives? Every IT action should enhance the end-user experience, whether it’s for customers, clients, or internal users. At Topgolf, Hanna translates IT decisions directly to their “player experience,” ensuring every technology choice meets customer satisfaction and engagement goals.
• Are we measuring what matters? Key performance indicators (KPIs) should reflect business value, not just technical outputs. Hanna’s team, for instance, closely monitors engagement metrics to directly connect IT performance to customer satisfaction.
• Is the ROI on IT investments clear? Clear metrics and ROI assessments make the case for IT spending. For Hanna, measurable gains in customer satisfaction justify the IT budget, shifting it from a cost center to a driver of business value.

2. Streamline your toolset: Consolidate for clarity and efficiency

Andrea Curry, a former Marine and Director of Observability at McKesson, inherited a landscape of 22 monitoring and management tools—each with overlapping functions and costs. Her CTO asked, “Why do we have so many tools?” she recalls. This sparked a consolidation effort from 22 to 5 essential solutions. Curry’s team reduced both complexity and redundancy, ultimately enhancing visibility and response time.   Key lessons include:

• Inventory first: Conduct a comprehensive assessment of all current solutions and their roles. Curry’s team mapped out each tool’s purpose and cost, laying the groundwork for informed decisions.
• Eliminate redundancies: Challenge the necessity of every tool. Can one solution handle multiple functions? Curry found that eliminating overlapping tools streamlined support needs and freed resources for higher-value projects.
• Prioritize high-impact solutions: Retain tools that directly contribute to organizational goals. With fewer, more powerful tools, her team reduced noise and gained clearer insights into their environments.

3. Embrace predictive power: Harness AI for enhanced observability

With 13,000 daily alerts, Shawn Landreth, VP of Networking and NetDevOps at Capital Group, faced an overwhelming workload for this team. Implementing AI-powered monitoring leveraging LogicMonitor Edwin AI, Capital Group’s IT team cut alerts by 89% and saved $1 million annually. Landreth’s experience underscores:

• AI is a necessity: Advanced AI tools are no longer a luxury but a necessity for managing complex IT environments. For Landreth, Edwin AI is transforming monitoring from reactive to proactive by detecting potential issues early.
• Proactive monitoring matters: AI-driven insights allow teams to maintain uptime and reduce costly incidents by identifying and addressing potential failures before they escalate. This predictive capability saves time and empowers the team to focus on innovation.
• Reduce alert fatigue: AI filters out low-priority alerts, ensuring the team focuses on the critical few. In Capital Group’s case, reducing daily alerts freed up resources for high-value projects, enabling the team to be more strategic.

4. Stay ahead: Adopt new technology proactively 

When Curry took on her role at McKesson, she transitioned from traditional monitoring to a comprehensive observability model. This strategic shift from a reactive approach to proactive observability reflects the adaptive mindset required for modern IT leadership. Leaders aiming to stay competitive should consider:

• Continuously upskill: Keep pace with evolving technologies to ensure the team’s relevance and competitiveness. Curry regularly brings in training on emerging trends to ensure her team stays at the leading edge of technology.
• Experiment strategically: Curry pilots promising new technologies to assess their value before large-scale deployment. This experimental approach enables a data-backed strategy for technology adoption.
• Cultivate a culture of innovation: Foster an environment where team members feel encouraged to explore and embrace new ideas. Curry’s team has adopted a mindset of continual improvement, prioritizing innovation in their daily workflows.

5. Strategic partnerships: Choose vendors invested in your success

Across the board, our panelists emphasized the importance of strong relationships. Landreth puts it simply, “Who’s going to roll their sleeves up with us? Who’s going to jump in for us?” The right partnerships can transform IT operations by aligning vendors with organizational success. When evaluating partners, consider:

• Shared goals: A successful vendor relationship aligns with your organizational vision, whether for scalability, cost-efficiency, or innovation. Landreth’s team prioritizes vendors that actively support Capital Group’s long-term objectives.
• Proactive support: A valuable partner offers prompt, ongoing support, not just periodic check-ins. For example, Curry’s vendors provide tailored, in-depth support that addresses her team’s specific needs.
• Ongoing collaboration: Partnerships that prioritize long-term success over quick wins foster collaborative innovation. Vendors who integrate their solutions with internal processes build stronger, more effective alliances.

Wrapping up

Our panelists’ strategies—from tool consolidation to AI-powered monitoring and strategic partnerships—all enable IT teams to move beyond reactive firefighting into a proactive, value-driven approach.

By implementing these approaches, you can transform your IT organization from a cost center into a true driver of business value, turning the complexity of modern IT into an opportunity for growth and innovation.

As a site reliability engineer (SRE), you juggle a lot of moving targets. You keep tabs on your operational environment’s health and maximize service levels, all while trying to scale your business and exceed client expectations. To hold it all together, you’ve likely implemented a hybrid cloud strategy to keep a watchful eye over everything: your on-premises infrastructure, containers, and numerous cloud deployments. But before you know it, you have multiple monitoring tools tracking every system in your stack. 

Historically, rapid growth meant providing teams with their own monitoring tools to satisfy immediate needs. Maybe IT ops cares about workloads across core infrastructure to ensure transaction speed, while cloud ops teams handle day-to-day coding, testing, and deployment for the website. As a result, developing and operationalizing across environments becomes complex and expensive, especially when you cannot connect what happens across your stack. Suddenly, you’re struggling with multiple, siloed observability tools, gazing at an array of disconnected dashboards. How do you scale and keep pace with modern systems development when you’re drowning in a confusing cacophony of alert noise? Recognizing and resolving alerts becomes tedious. Are alerts related? Are tools connected? Are you recognizing root causes and spotting anomalies, or are you simply reacting to issues? 

Take, for example, a website crashing during a huge sale. Cue panic. You could rely on a combination of logs and traces to try to locate the meltdown, but what was the true root cause? Was it because of inadequate server capacity, or was it something preventable like a microservice mishap? When you have disconnected monitoring tools across your stack, locating – and better yet, predicting – errors becomes daunting. The result? Lost revenue, unplanned downtime, and angry customers. The long-term impacts are worse: the cost and complexity of managing multiple tools becomes unsustainable.

Growing with a “tools first” approach results in tool sprawl, which can cause major observability problems for SREs who rely on timely data to balance scalability and reliability. They need to quickly make decisions for the business without being bogged down by confusing alert noise and rely on the health of cloud services to do it. You can’t hunt through logs and incidents using dozens of monitoring tools and expect meaningful insights. You want to cut the noise, surface the most pressing alerts, and gain insights when and where you need them. 

You need full visibility in one place to transform and efficiently measure against your hybrid multi-cloud systems goals. You need a single, scalable observability platform. 

LogicMonitor efficiently solves tool sprawl with a single hybrid observability platform that scales across your entire hybrid multi-cloud environment. Our LM Envision platform enables you to observe the health of your entire enterprise, across on-premises, multi-cloud, containerized deployments, and business productivity applications. You can do this using our customizable dashboards and enhanced visualizations all in one place.

With LogicMonitor, your teams have visibility into the same observability data across the enterprise, tearing down silos and removing blind spots so that everyone has insight into critical business health. Here’s what it means for your bottom line: 

• Save time and money: Reduce toil and time spent researching and solving for alerts. LogicMonitor is built for hybrid multi-cloud environments by surfacing the most relevant alerts using root cause analysis for efficient visibility across dependent monitored resources. Reduce your cost and overhead by consolidating disparate monitoring tools into one unified platform, and manage your capacity and cloud instances to utilize what you need, when you need it. 
• Always improve: LogicMonitor adapts with your business by easily allowing you to add or change clouds and instances to your single observability solution, letting you spot dependencies in the same place. We enable you to drive productivity without getting lost in siloed tools, setting you up to scale as you alter your cloud deployments over time.
• Happy customers: Better reliability means you’re always there for your customers. Observing performance across all your clouds in one place lets your teams quickly spot anomalies and dependencies, shortening recovery time so that your business stays online 24/7.

To learn more about how LogicMonitor can help you consolidate your monitoring tools and emphasize the “reliable” in “reliability,” check out our Cloud Monitoring page.

Too Many Tools
Birmingham-based TekLinks is one of the top managed service providers (MSPs) in the world. A long-time LogicMonitor customer and partner, TekLinks owns and operates three data centers and services more than a thousand customers, making it a true enterprise. The success and rapid growth of the company, along with business acquisitions and individual software procurement resulted in a classic case of “too many tools” for the sophisticated MSP.

MSP monitoring solutions need to do more than just provide visibility. They need to extract and deliver powerful business insight to drive results. For TekLinks to grow to the next level successfully, they needed to simplify their toolset, consolidate vendors and empower users within the organization with insight into how their entire IT infrastructure was performing….from data centers to devices and applications. The combination of a thoughtful approach, considered processes and the implementation of LogicMonitor, resulted in a very successful tool consolidation project. They were guided by three steps to get there:

#1. Create a single source of alerting for internal operators and customers
TekLinks had multiple monitoring systems in place prior to consolidation. Some solutions provided text alerts, others sent alerts exlusively via email, and some didn’t alert at all. There was no single way to have visibility into all the systems by everyone on the team. And the lack of key platform features like role-based access control and multi-tenancy meant their customers had no visibility into the systems being managed.

The requirement seemed simple: allow every team and individual in the organization to have access to the same information to address issues, and allow customers access to the same information, securely. But did such a solution exist? None of their existing monitoring solutions fulfilled this basic requirement.

#2. Identify services architectures
TekLinks needed to understand all the various services architectures and their dependencies to truly understand the scope of the monitoring that needed to be deployed. In some cases, TekLinks had hardware that operated in a silo, and the monitoring system needed to see into every layer of the hardware stack. Additionally, in TekLink’s case, every customer needed its own security zone, so the chosen monitoring tool could not be deployed in a centralized network with firewalls and private connections to gain the needed visibility. That would be too complex.

To add to the architecture complexity, TekLinks works with some of the largest hardware vendors in the world in addition to several highly customized, open-source technologies. The deployment needed to work with everything from basic Cisco switches to temperature control systems in the datacenter. The LogicMonitor platform was the only solution that met these requirements. Beyond that, because LogicMonitor is SaaS-based, there was no need to allocate any of the existing infrastructure to run the monitoring platform. The agentless solution sits outside of the system being monitored, which means it stays running even during an outage.

#3. Understand who you want to notify, and how
TekLinks not only needed a “single source of truth” for internal operations, they also required it to provide operational transparency to customers. Thanks to LogicMonitor’s multi-tenancy and granular role-based access control, TekLinks is able to share data used by the NOC team, alerting customers to issues when and where appropriate.

Offering LogicMonitor as a single solution has helped TekLinks grow their business. Because the entire organization can view customer monitoring data, the sales team can identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities and proactively alert their customers with solutions.

The Importance of Business Outcomes
Over the course of this process, TekLinks found that first and foremost, they needed to start from the business outcomes and work backwards. Build a Policy and Procedures Statement that documents how information should flow. Make sure all stakeholders clearly understand these policies and their impact. Making a change will often require buy-in when introducing new tools and procedures. Here, too, LogicMonitor helps ease the transition by allowing product, engineering, sales and management teams see real value in a truly integrated environment.

In the end, TekLink’s consolidation project succeeded not just because they chose the right monitoring solution. It worked because the organization was willing to constantly improve their internal processes. They realized that even one of the top MSPs in the world can get better, and do more to make good on their promises.