Less is more: industry leaders share their success with tool consolidation for maximized productivity

We’ve known for years that context switching is detrimental to productivity. Both computers and humans become less productive with each additional concurrent task or priority. Every time you need to shift your focus between projects, you lose approximately 20% efficiency as you figure out where you left off, what needs to be done, how the work fits into the project, etc.

In your day-to-day work life, you and your team probably use about nine apps, juggling notifications, communication, meetings, task management, focused work… the list goes on. This leads to increased stress and lower productivity. If one of your primary objectives is to move quickly, bringing solutions to market fast or fixing issues ASAP, this issue can directly inhibit your success.

Tool consolidation is an obvious solution to stress, frustration, lower productivity, and even reduced speed of work. With fewer applications, you and your team will reduce how often you're context switching so that you can all truly focus on the task at hand.

This isn’t only for combining application reliability and security use cases onto a single platform - you might already find success when you consolidate tools for “just” observability or security.

If you’re using more than one tool for observability or security, you may already find that your team is duplicating work, grappling with context switching, and spending more money than needed to keep your application reliable and secure. While we will always say a single platform for both observability and security is a win, you could still come out ahead by consolidating one of those areas.

Tool consolidation for observability

Laurel uses AI to relieve legal professionals from manual time tracking, automating billing for professional services. Before consolidating their observability tool, the Laurel team used nine vendors to monitor their application. It makes sense that they had to stay on top of their Service Level Objectives (SLOs) – violating your SLA is a way bigger deal when all your customers are lawyers!

After consolidating with Sumo Logic, Laurel no longer had to migrate data from one tool to another to monitor the application. With reliability management under control with SLOs, the engineers’ quality of life improved and the team could confidently answer that dubious executive question of “Are our customers happy?” with ease.

But even if you don’t have nine monitoring and observability vendors, you can struggle with tool and data sprawl.

Acquia is a leader in the digital experience market, empowering thousands of companies to create digital customer experiences. The engineering team had two vendors for telemetry, which meant that the team had to navigate and learn two systems. Plus, the tool sprawl created a gap in visibility with no way to get an end-to-end view of logs, metrics and events in one place. They consolidated their observability tools with Sumo Logic in just six months — completing their project on time and under budget!

“There's no duplication of our integrations or any compatibility issues. All our internal users can now focus on building their expertise on Sumo Logic, so everything is straightforward and our adoption is widespread,” said Farnoosh Azadi, Director of Engineering at Acquia.

This has greatly impacted performance, as teams across the organization use the same platform to solve myriad problems. Quality engineering (QE) teams rely on a range of dashboards to track and report on test results; account managers use dashboards to keep a watchful eye and audit customer servers; and the support teams use telemetry and dashboards to manage incident response and monitor health diagnostics to deliver a high-quality experience for customers.

Observability tools and telemetry sources are varied and tricky to manage. With OpenTelemetry, you’re able to consolidate without thinking. Bringing all your logs and metrics from a range of cloud-native applications into your dashboard means you get a single pane of glass view for true observability. Not only is your log management and log analytics vital for faster troubleshooting, but it can also free up your engineering for more creative and nuanced work.

Tool consolidation for observability and security

You can also take your tool consolidation beyond observability like SoSafe did. SoSafe is a leading cybersecurity awareness company in the DACH region of Europe. Using various tools was time-consuming and difficult for the DevOps and security teams, leading SoSafe to unify telemetry monitoring and analysis for security, compliance, and observability.

With a single solution, SoSafe can support a wide range of use cases, from optimizing software delivery to monitoring the security environment to ensuring compliance with GDPR requirements. To be successful in their roles, teams no longer need to learn a ton of different technologies and context switch between different solutions.

“Sumo Logic’s out-of-the-box content gave us a great head start and made it easy to quickly begin finding interesting things. With all the security insights in one place now, we’ve improved our incident response times,” said Daniela Ramirez Villarroel, SOC Lead at SoSafe.

Tool consolidation at a larger scale can yield even larger results. Infor is a leading provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for the aerospace, defense, healthcare, hospitality, human resource management, and automotive industries. The team centralized their 12 TB of daily log monitoring and telemetry data to give granular visibility across their DevOps, InfoSec, infrastructure and other teams. That’s 4,000 users across 120 teams! Not only did they accelerate their troubleshooting and software release quality, but they also saved a million dollars thanks to Sumo Logic’s data tiers.

Tool consolidation for security

Netskope is a global cybersecurity leader, empowering its more than 2,000 customers to apply zero trust principles to protect data with its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. Their insider threat monitoring program required rapid and accurate insights into user behaviors. This meant investing in real-time data analysis.

When it comes to security, simply monitoring for insider threats can take “at least five people, ten tools and a minimum of 90 minutes of human work time per investigation. That's a lot of resources for an SOP. Plus, what if a request comes in on a weekend or after business hours where there’s less coverage?” - Sean Salomon, Information Security Analyst at Netskope.

Thanks to tool consolidation, Netskope no longer needs to connect and share credentials to various API endpoints or tools. Instead, they can use a single tool for insider threat detection with Cloud SIEM.