Ask a CXO what their top priorities are for the year and it’s likely that tackling complexity head on by shedding unwanted or unneeded tools will top their list. Like any household facing the consistent build up of clutter over time, enterprise tools can quickly multiply and get out of control. In Splunk’s State of Observability 2023 report, 81% of respondents admitted to increasing the number of observability tools and capabilities they use, and among that group, a third called the increase significant. Just how significant? Organizations report operating and maintaining an average of 165 internally developed business applications, with 51% in the public cloud and 49% on-premises.

The accumulation of tools over the years affects all sides of the business. Observability teams struggle with everything from digital experience monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and infrastructure monitoring to log analysis, AIOps, and incident response. On the security side, practitioners wrangle a myriad of SOC automation tools, including multiple SIEM deployments, security analysis tools, and different cloud security tools for various platforms in a multicloud environment, as well compliance and data privacy, product and application security, and incident investigation and forensics tools — all in different parts of the organization.