05-08-2025
From Chaos To Concert: Curating Your DevOps Tool Orchestra
Leah Dodson, Founder of Piqued Solutions. Advising leaders on secure, scalable, and strategic tech growth.
What begins as a well-intentioned effort to streamline development often ends in noise: overlapping tools, disconnected workflows, ballooning costs and growing security gaps. In fact, nearly 75% of DevSecOps professionals already leveraging AI admit they need to consolidate their sprawling toolsets to cut complexity and risk.
Across industries, teams are burdened with too many tools solving the same problems in slightly different ways. The result is a fragmented environment where efficiency drops, teams become frustrated and complexity obscures risk.
The Hidden Cost Of Too Many Tools
When each team selects tools in isolation, whether it's CI pipelines here, code scanning platforms there or multiple dashboards with no central integration, it quickly becomes difficult to manage, much less optimize.
This isn't an isolated issue. In GitLab's 2024 Global DevSecOps Survey, more than 78% of professionals said they spend at least a quarter of their day just maintaining or integrating tools. This time lost could have been spent building value instead.
In one organization, we discovered seven separate tools that touched code quality or security. Many of these tools had overlapping functions, few were fully utilized and none were centrally governed. The cost wasn't just financial. Engineers were wasting hours reconciling data, navigating different UIs and adapting workflows across tools that didn't talk to each other. Meanwhile, leadership had no reliable view of their overall performance or risk exposure.
Start With An Audit, Not An Assumption
Visibility is often worse than assumed. Only 5% of IT leaders report having full insight into what software licenses are even being used, let alone how effectively.
Before changing your toolset, start with a tech stack audit. Identify each tool, its primary function, the teams using it and any associated costs or contract obligations. Go beyond the budget line item and assess how much time each tool demands from your team and whether it meaningfully contributes to your delivery, security or reliability goals.
Ask questions like:
• Which tools are actively used in production workflows?
• Do multiple tools cover the same function?
• Are any tools required for compliance or client obligations?
• What level of expertise is needed to use each tool well?
This process often reveals shelfware, redundant tools or ones with unclear ownership. Any of these is a sign your stack needs attention.
Define Harmony: Align Tools To Teams
The next step is to evaluate each tool based on how well it fits your team's skills and workflows. A powerful tool with a steep learning curve might sound good in theory. But if your team isn't equipped to use it, it creates more friction than value.
Focus on tools that:
• Integrate smoothly into the way your team already works.
• Offer automation and extensibility.
• Provide visibility across development, security and operations.
• Scale without requiring constant reinvention.
The right combination of tools should feel cohesive and purposeful. Each one should serve a distinct function while contributing to a system that runs more efficiently as a whole.
Curate With Intent, Not Convenience
It's easy to add tools reactively. A new requirement appears, and a new solution is introduced. Over time, these one-off decisions lead to sprawl and inefficiency.
Instead, ask:
• Can an existing tool solve this new problem with configuration or add-ons?
• Does this new tool integrate with the existing stack?
• Will it reduce complexity or simply layer on more?
Consider consolidating where possible. Standardize workflows across teams. Use automation to reduce human error and improve consistency. Centralization pays off. In fact, 79 % of teams that centralized their observability tooling reported savings in either cost or time.
Treat The Stack As A Living System
The tools that serve you well today may not be the right fit six months from now. New business goals, changes in team structure or updated compliance requirements all shift the landscape.
Set a regular review cycle. Quarterly or biannual check-ins often work well. Use these moments to ask:
• What's still delivering value?
• Where is friction increasing?
• Are we paying for features we no longer need?
In one organization, moving from multiple monitoring tools to a single observability platform saved over $100,000 per year. It also gave the team real-time insight they never had before.
Tune The Orchestra, Don't Add Noise
Curating your DevOps toolchain isn't just about cutting costs—it's about improving clarity, efficiency and resilience. A strong DevOps environment doesn't need more instruments. It needs better coordination, clearer signals and tools that work together with purpose.
With a focused audit, thoughtful alignment and regular tuning, even a noisy stack can become a cohesive system that helps your team deliver with confidence.
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