To get visibility, IT and engineering organizations invest in monitoring and observability tools. But not just one. Different technology teams adopt specialist tools: SIEM platforms for security logging, IT monitoring tools for server infrastructure, open-source observability databases for container monitoring, and built-in cloud monitoring for serverless and PaaS.

Beyond monitoring tools, a full understanding of what's happening also relies on other data – service tickets from the ITSM tools, changes from the CI/CD platforms, user behaviour from the product analytics tools, and third-party dependencies that publish their own status.

It's for good reason that operational data is scattered across a sprawl of tools.

But what is a single pane of glass? How do you create one? Early attempts at a single-pane-of-glass focused on aggregating alerts from multiple tools into one place. The result was an overwhelming deluge of alerts that were noisy, lacking in context and effectively unactionable.

More recent attempts to build a single-pane-of-glass take a brute force approach: if you want one place to see everything then bring everything into one place. The solution is a single monolithic tool that copies and stores data from across the engineering stack, similar to the data warehouse or data lake that business teams attempt to create for BI purposes. Like those business data warehouses, creating and maintaining a central platform for all your operational data takes a colossal effort, incurs a great expense, and is forever one step behind the changes happening in the engineering stack.

It's not only impractical to implement a monolithic data store of everything – it rarely achieves the desired outcome. All that centralized data sits behind a complex analytics interface, requiring a centralized team to provide answers for the individual users looking for insights, and struggling to do so because they don’t have knowledge of the systems and processes the data describes.