77% of Engineering Leaders Want Fewer Tools. Here's Why It's So Hard.
Grafana Labs surveyed thousands of observability practitioners for their 2025 Observability Survey and found something that will resonate with anyone who has been on-call at a small engineering team: organizations use an average of eight observability tools. Down from nine the year before, which counts as progress, but not much.
More telling: 77% of respondents rated tool consolidation as important. Yet only 14% said their consolidation efforts have been "very successful." The rest are somewhere in the middle -- aware of the problem, struggling with the fix.
If you manage infrastructure at a 5-50 person engineering team, you probably recognize the pattern. You did not set out to build a Rube Goldberg machine of monitoring tools. It just happened.
How Small Teams End Up with Three Separate Tools
The typical monitoring stack for a small-to-midsize engineering team looks something like this:
- Uptime monitoring (Pingdom, UptimeRobot, or similar) -- checks that your endpoints are responding
- Incident management and on-call (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) -- routes alerts to the right person at the right time
- Status pages (Statuspage, Instatus, or Cachet) -- communicates outages to customers
These tools exist as separate products for historical reasons. Uptime monitoring started as a simple "ping and check" service in the early 2000s. Incident management grew out of enterprise IT operations and ITIL practices. Status pages emerged as a transparency tool after high-profile outages at companies like Amazon and GitHub made customers demand better communication.
Each category solved a distinct problem for a distinct buyer. The uptime tool was bought by a developer who wanted to know when things broke. PagerDuty was adopted by an ops team tired of missed pages. The status page was set up by a support lead who was drowning in "Is it down?" tickets.
The result: three tools, three logins, three billing relationships, three sets of integrations. And when something actually goes wrong, a person has to stitch them together in real time.
The Hidden Costs Beyond Subscription Fees
The line items on your credit card statement are the easy part. Pingdom runs $15-100/month depending on check volume. PagerDuty starts at $21/user/month for the professional tier. Statuspage costs $79/month or more at the team level. For a 10-person engineering team, you are looking at $300-700/month before you even consider the operational costs.
But the subscription fees are the smallest part of the bill.
Context switching during incidents
Research from the University of California, Irvine found that each context switch costs 15-25 minutes of cognitive recovery time. During an incident, your on-call engineer is switching between a monitoring dashboard, an incident management console, and a status page editor -- three different tools with three different interfaces, three different mental models.
This is not an abstract productivity concern. It is minutes added to your mean time to resolution (MTTR) while customers sit on a broken product.
Duplicate alert configuration
Every monitoring check needs a corresponding alert rule. When your monitoring tool and incident management tool are separate systems, you are configuring alerts in two places. Add a new service? Update both. Change an escalation policy? Make sure it matches the monitoring thresholds. Forget one? Congratulations, you have a gap that will surface at 3 AM.
Onboarding friction
A new engineer joining your team needs to learn three tools, set up three accounts, understand three different notification systems, and figure out how they connect. At a large company with dedicated platform teams, this gets documented and automated. At a 15-person startup, it gets explained on a Zoom call and then forgotten.
Integration maintenance
Tools A, B, and C need to talk to each other. That means webhooks, API tokens, and integration configurations that someone set up two years ago and no one fully understands. When one vendor changes their API or deprecates a webhook format, integrations break silently -- often discovered only during the next incident.
Data silos
This is the most expensive hidden cost. Your monitoring data lives in one system. Your incident history lives in another. Your customer communication records live in a third. Want to answer "How quickly did we respond to the last five incidents affecting this service?" Good luck correlating data across three different tools with three different data models.
The Incident Timeline Problem
Here is what a typical incident looks like with a three-tool stack:
Minute 0: Monitor detects that the checkout API is returning 500 errors. (Tool 1)
Minute 1-2: Monitor triggers a webhook to the incident management tool. The webhook fires, assuming the integration is working. (Handoff 1)
Minute 2-3: Incident management tool creates an alert and pages the on-call engineer based on the current schedule. (Tool 2)
Minute 3-5: On-call engineer acknowledges the alert, switches to the monitoring dashboard to understand the scope, switches back to the incident tool to update the severity.
Minute 5-10: Engineer starts investigating. Simultaneously, they -- or someone else -- needs to go to the status page tool, log in, create a new incident, write a customer-facing update, and publish it. (Tool 3)
Minute 10-15: Every subsequent update requires the engineer to context-switch back to the status page, write another update, and publish. Or delegate to someone else who is now playing telephone with the person debugging the issue.
Each handoff between tools is a potential failure point. The webhook between the monitor and the incident tool can fail silently. The status page update relies on a human remembering to do it while they are focused on fixing the problem. The whole chain depends on integrations that were configured months ago and never tested.
The Grafana survey backs this up at scale: 39% of engineering teams cited complexity and operational overhead as their single biggest obstacle in observability -- the most commonly reported challenge.
How Consolidation Changes the Math
When your monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, and status page live in the same platform, the incident timeline collapses:
Minute 0: Monitor detects the 500 errors and creates an incident automatically.
Minute 0-1: The platform pages the on-call engineer based on the on-call schedule (same system, no webhook needed) and optionally publishes an initial status page update.
Minute 1-3: The engineer investigates in the same interface where the alert fired. Updating the status page is a toggle or a single click from the incident view, not a separate login to a separate product.
The handoffs disappear. The failure points between tools disappear. The cognitive load of switching between dashboards disappears.
A 15% improvement in MTTR from eliminating tool switching and handoff delays is a conservative estimate. For a team handling two P1 incidents per month, that translates to meaningful reductions in customer impact and the kind of on-call experience that does not burn people out.
Beyond incident response, consolidation simplifies everything upstream. One place to configure alerts. One place to manage on-call schedules. One place to set up escalation policies. One place to onboard new team members.
The Honest Trade-Off
Unified tools sacrifice depth for breadth. This is worth acknowledging directly.
A dedicated uptime monitoring tool like Pingdom has had 15+ years to build features for every edge case of HTTP monitoring. PagerDuty has built incredibly sophisticated escalation logic, analytics, and integrations with hundreds of services. Statuspage has deep customization options and a wide subscriber notification system.
A consolidated platform will not match every specialized feature from every dedicated tool. It does not need to.
The question is whether the marginal feature depth of a specialized tool is worth the operational overhead of maintaining three separate systems. For a 200-person SRE team at a Fortune 500 company running complex microservices with highly specialized monitoring needs, the answer might be yes -- the depth justifies the sprawl.
For a 10-person engineering team that needs reliable uptime monitoring, sensible on-call rotations, fast incident response, and a status page that stays updated during outages? The consolidation wins. The features you actually use in each specialized tool represent maybe 20-30% of what the tool offers. You are paying full price (in money and complexity) for capabilities you will never touch.
What to Look for in a Consolidated Platform
If you are evaluating a move from three tools to one, here is what matters:
Monitoring that is good enough. You need HTTP, keyword, and API monitoring with configurable check intervals and multi-region checks. You do not need a tool that also does APM, log management, and distributed tracing if you are a small team.
On-call scheduling that respects your team. Rotation management, escalation policies, and multiple notification channels (phone, SMS, Slack, email). The basics need to be solid.
Incident management that connects the dots. When a monitor fires, it should automatically create an incident, page the right person, and give them context -- without a webhook chain that can break.
Status pages that update from the incident. The status page should be a view of the incident, not a separate thing that someone has to manually maintain in parallel.
Data that lives together. Monitoring history, incident timelines, response metrics, and customer communications in one place. This is the real long-term value of consolidation: the ability to learn from past incidents without pulling data from three systems.
Where Alert24 Fits
Alert24 was built specifically for this consolidation use case. It combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, and status pages in a single platform designed for small-to-midsize engineering teams.
When a monitor detects an issue, Alert24 creates an incident, alerts the on-call engineer, and can update your status page -- all in one workflow. No webhooks between separate products. No integration maintenance. No context switching between dashboards during a 3 AM incident.
This is not a radical idea. It is the logical conclusion of what 77% of engineering leaders already say they want: fewer tools, less complexity, faster response times.
The average organization is running eight observability tools. Most are actively trying to reduce that number. If your current stack includes separate tools for monitoring, incidents, and status pages, consolidation is probably the highest-leverage change you can make -- not because any individual tool is bad, but because the gaps between them are where incidents get worse.
Sources: Grafana Labs 2025 Observability Survey, Grafana Labs Observability Survey Takeaways, LogicMonitor on Monitoring Sprawl, OneUptime: The True Cost of Observability Tool Sprawl