Building on Legacy: How Government Agencies Can Consolidate Tools with Automation

Building on Legacy: How Government Agencies Can Consolidate Tools with Automation

Tool sprawl, further compounded by the inflexibility of legacy tools, poses a major challenge for government IT teams.  

As agencies work to deliver the digital services their constituents demand, their digital ecosystems have grown to comprise numerous apps, systems and microservices, all specific to the individual IT components of the experience. With disparate tools and systems leading to siloed insights, higher costs, and increased complexity, it’s easy for technical debt to get out of hand. This is further compounded by the additional tools needed to monitor and maintain existing legacy systems as well as their integrations to each other.  

Amidst this chaos and without a single source of truth across the entire stack, ITOps teams struggle to gain visibility into end-to-end system health, which can lead to delays in issue detection and diagnosis, longer mean time to repair (MTTR), service outages and diminished citizen experiences. In some cases, using too many tools can create conflicting information, resulting in teams inadvertently working against each other to solve issues. Limited and fragmented visibility also creates system and data silos that hinder IT efficiency and digital transformation. All of which makes the goal of intelligent automation even more complex. 

Against this backdrop, government IT leaders must streamline operations by consolidating tools. This involves making difficult decisions about which monitoring tools to prioritize, which to add, and which to retire to reduce the complexity and technical debt in order to realistically achieve automated actions.  

Enable innovation by reducing sprawl  

Consolidating tools within government agencies can be a time-consuming process. Different teams have specific needs and preferences for tools that support various tasks. This means there are potentially dozens, if not hundreds, of stakeholders across ITOps, DevOps, the SOC, procurement, business stakeholders, and more – each with a say in the value each tool brings to the agency. 

Fortunately, integrating a streamlined solutions into the process can help ITOps teams optimize their monitoring tools through the deployment of AI, ML, and automation. Using a human-friendly platform like ScienceLogic’s SL1, agencies can combine all the critical functions required to support a healthy IT environment in a unified solution. 

Here are four benefits agencies can realize by integrating and ultimately replacing disparate point solutions with SL1: 

1. Integrate existing, compatible tools into a single observability platform 

SL1’s out-of-the-box monitoring templates make it easy to integrate disparate point solutions or custom monitoring tools from any vendor and any technology. Leveraging SL1’s global monitoring capabilities, agencies can easily identify and eliminate redundancies by retiring existing legacy tools. 

Additionally, pre-built integrations enable seamless data flow across the hybrid IT environment. This provides visibility across various systems such as compute, network, storage, security, cloud, application, IoT, and unified communication, as well as vendors including AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, HPE, VMWare, ServiceNow, and more. 

SL1 can even harmonize custom equipment or applications with the rest of the IT environment. Our Software Development Kit (SDK) includes flexible options for quickly building and deploying custom integrations.  

With the increased visibility and data synchronization that AI and automation brings, it’s much easier for ITOps to determine each tool’s value and identify opportunities for further tool rationalization. 

1. Easily scale and manage IT solutions 

With broader visibility across all devices, interfaces, and events, SL1 delivers a normalized view of business services across the entire agency or department. And with SL1’s scalability and extensibility, ITOps teams can extend monitoring to whatever assets they need including a growing catalog of on-premises and cloud services.  

SL1 automatically discovers new assets, populates the CMDB, and monitors newly provisioned services so agencies can confidently onboard new services faster, control costs, and minimize risk. 

They can also leverage low/no-code tools to onboard and monitor custom assets specific to their environment, ensuring the agency is always mission-ready.  

SL1 uses advanced AI and ML to automatically gather and analyze crucial diagnostic data from different parts of an organization’s IT infrastructure. With this in-depth analysis, IT teams can quickly identify and resolve issues without having to review data from multiple sources. SL1 can diagnose root cause 10x faster and with 99% accuracy, which translates into 60% faster MTTR than before tools consolidation. 

This translates into significant efficiencies for ITOps teams. By eliminating the need to rely on the expertise of Level 3 engineers or spending hours researching error codes, Level 1 and 2 engineers can be more agile and accelerate incident resolution. In doing so, agencies can avoid potential problems that could negatively impact user and citizen experiences. 

Perhaps the single biggest benefit of consolidation is achievable intelligent automation. Using SL1 as a consolidated, secure, and comprehensive platfrom, means that ITOps teams can move away from manual, error-prone tasks and extend automated issue discovery and resolution workflows across the hybrid IT estate. 

SL1 enables powerful IT workflow automations, including: 

• Accelerated service request management 
• Continuous asset discovery 
• Data federation and IT workflow automation with IT management tools, including ITSM Service Desk, CMDB, notification tools, and more 
• Automated troubleshooting and incident management (including what actions the platform takes when conditions are met) 
• Integrated and orchestrated people, processes, and systems across all teams 

Conclusion 

An automation-based approach to eliminating tool sprawl cuts complexity, increases operational efficiency and agility and helps agencies maximize their modernization budget.  

Plus, by breaking down silos using AI, ML, and automation, IT leaders can gain a better understanding of their tech stack, which tools add value (and which don’t), and make more informed discussions about tools consolidation.  

Learn more about how ScienceLogic can transform your agency through tools consolidation with the SL1 platform and unlock the potential for autonomous IT Operations.