Enterprise IT organizations spend millions on monitoring and observability, and most still can’t get a single coordinated view of their environment. Tools stay siloed by team. Operators assemble context by hand, incident after incident.

Enterprise Management Associates surveyed 356 IT professionals actively working on observability unification to find out what separates the organizations making progress from the ones stuck in the middle. Not one of them had consolidated onto a single tool.

This report covers what they’re doing instead.

What’s Inside

• Where tool sprawl actually costs you — the operational and personnel impact of running four to twelve platforms, measured
• What separates the mature from the stalled — why governance, engineering depth, and ownership outrank budget and headcount
• The five stages of unification — EMA’s framework, from visibility through AI-enabled operational execution
• Why ServiceOps integration is the dividing line — and what fully integrated observability and ITSM changes about incident response
• Where AI fits, and where it doesn’t — why AI amplifies a mature operating model rather than fixing a fragmented one
• The single most common mistake — named by three times as many respondents as any other answer