Optimize Your IT Tool Stack Without Losing Visibility or Control

IT teams rarely set out to create tool sprawl. It usually happens one “quick fix” at a time, a monitoring tool added for a new environment, a ticketing add-on to close a gap, a security product bought after an audit. Over time, the stack becomes expensive, hard to manage, and harder to trust.

A better approach is to treat your tool stack like a portfolio, align it to outcomes, measure what is working, and retire what is not. This framework works for internal IT teams and MSPs, and it is built for real-world constraints like limited time, mixed infrastructure, and budget pressure.

Why IT tool stack optimization matters

When your stack grows faster than your operating model, three things happen:

1. Costs rise in ways that are hard to forecast, especially with seat-based and consumption-based pricing.
2. Risk increases because identity, permissions, and logging become inconsistent across tools.
3. Execution slows because teams spend time switching systems, reconciling data, and manually stitching workflows together.

ITIL 4’s guiding principles push teams to focus on value, keep things simple and practical, and optimize and automate where it makes sense. Those principles are a strong lens for tool decisions because they keep you grounded in outcomes rather than features.

Step 1, start with outcomes, not tools

Before you touch the stack, define the outcomes you want the stack to deliver. Limit it to three to five so you can measure progress.

Common outcomes include:

• Faster endpoint onboarding
• Higher patch compliance
• Lower ticket resolution time
• Better audit readiness
• Fewer outages caused by changes

These outcomes are more useful than a goal like “reduce tools by 20 percent” because they map directly to service delivery and user experience, which is exactly what “focus on value” is trying to protect.

Step 2, build a real inventory, the step most teams skip

You cannot optimize what you cannot see. Build a single inventory of every tool and SaaS that touches IT work.

Capture:

• Primary use case
• Owner, approver, and admin contacts
• Active users versus paid seats
• Integrations and data dependencies
• Data sensitivity and access level
• Renewal date, contract terms, and total annual cost
• What breaks if the tool disappears tomorrow

The US Federal CIO Council’s Application Rationalization Playbook is explicit that rationalization starts with a detailed inventory and then compares value and total cost of ownership.

Practical tip: if you have SSO, export the application list and compare it to finance records. The overlap is usually where the truth lives.

Step 3, map tools to the work, then find overlap

Map your top workflows and identify which tools power each step. Do this before you start picking winners.

Workflows to map:

• Ticket intake, triage, escalation
• Endpoint provisioning and onboarding
• Patch and software deployment
• Remote support
• Monitoring and alerting
• Identity and access tasks
• Reporting and audits

Overlap usually shows up in monitoring, remote access, asset inventory, documentation, and security scanning. Watch for multiple tools claiming to be the “source of truth” for assets, users, or work. That is where automation breaks and reporting becomes unreliable, and it is exactly what “think and work holistically” is meant to prevent.

Step 4, score each tool using a simple decision model

With an inventory and workflow map, evaluate tools with a lightweight scoring model. Keep it simple so teams actually use it.

Score each category from 1 to 5:

• Business value: does it materially improve outcomes
• Technical fit: reliability, maintainability, integrations, vendor support
• Adoption: is the team using it as intended
• Risk: security exposure, permissions, audit impact, logging coverage
• Total cost: licenses, add-ons, labor hours, training time

Then classify each tool into a portfolio action. The Gartner TIME-style categories, tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate, are commonly used because they translate analysis into decisions instead of debates.

Step 5, consolidate intentionally

Consolidation is where the savings and simplicity appear, but it is also where teams can accidentally reduce visibility. The goal is to remove duplication and restore trust in the systems of record.

When you find duplicates, pick the winner based on:

• A single source of truth for inventory and identity ties
• Clean integrations into ticketing and monitoring
• Fewer admin surfaces and fewer agents on endpoints
• Reporting you can trust without manual cleanup

A reliable rule is to consolidate first, then automate. Automating broken processes simply makes the wrong work happen faster, which is why “optimize and automate” explicitly starts with optimization.

Where Level fits in, as an example

Many teams end up with separate tools for asset inventory, remote support, scripting, and patching, plus extra utilities to fill gaps. A modern RMM platform can reduce that sprawl if it becomes the operational hub for endpoint management and integrates cleanly with ticketing, identity, and reporting.

For example, Level can centralize endpoint visibility and automation for common IT work, while still fitting into a broader stack when you need specialized security or compliance tooling. The point is not the brand, it is whether the platform reduces duplicate sources of truth and supports the workflows you mapped.

Step 6, standardize integrations and data flow

Optimized stacks typically have a clear spine, a few systems that define truth and a predictable data flow between them.

A practical blueprint:

• Ticketing is the system of record for work
• Asset inventory is the system of record for devices
• Identity is the system of record for people and access
• Monitoring feeds tickets, not side channel noise
• Reporting pulls from authoritative sources only

This reduces manual reconciliation and helps teams act on signals instead of chasing noise. It also matches SRE guidance that monitoring should support debugging, alerting, and long-term improvement, not just produce dashboards.

Step 7, add security and monitoring requirements before you renew anything

Tool stack decisions are security decisions. If a tool cannot integrate with identity controls, cannot log administrative activity, or creates blind spots in monitoring, it is a risk multiplier.

NIST SP 800-53 provides a catalog of controls many organizations use as a reference for access control, auditing, and governance.
NIST SP 800-137 focuses on continuous monitoring, emphasizing visibility into assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and the effectiveness of controls.

Translate that into renewal requirements:

• Enforced SSO and MFA
• Role-based access that matches job responsibilities
• Audit logs that capture admin actions and changes
• Clear data retention and export capabilities
• Evidence you can use for audits without manual work

If a tool cannot meet these, put it in migrate or eliminate, even if the feature list looks great.

Step 8, put governance on rails so sprawl does not come back

A cleanup will not last unless governance is lightweight and continuous. The CIO Council playbook frames rationalization as an ongoing practice, and that mindset is the difference between a temporary cost cut and a durable operating model.

Simple governance that works:

• No new tool without an owner, an integration plan, and a retirement plan
• Quarterly tool review: usage, outcomes impact, cost, security notes
• Renewal checklist: keep, consolidate, replace, retire
• Standard naming, tagging, and access models across tools

For cost governance, borrow from FinOps thinking: shared accountability between engineering, finance, and business stakeholders, plus regular, data-driven review cycles.

Common failure points to watch during consolidation

A stack can look “lean” on paper and still fail in production if a few fundamentals are missed. The most common major failure points are identity gaps, no clear system of record, weak integrations that keep alerts out of ticketing, and security monitoring blind spots. These are the areas most likely to turn into outages, audit findings, or slow breach detection.

The smaller issues, inconsistent naming, alert noise, license waste, and stale runbooks, tend to drain time and money until they force a bigger project.

To keep the plan measurable, track a small KPI set each quarter: tool adoption rate, cost per endpoint or user, percentage of endpoints covered by patching and monitoring, and mean time to resolve incidents. If the metrics improve while the number of tools falls or stays flat, you are simplifying without losing control.

A fast first pass checklist you can run this week

1. Export your app list from SSO and compare it to finance spend.
2. Identify your top 10 tools by annual cost.
3. Flag tools with under 30 percent active usage.
4. Flag tools that duplicate the same workflow step.
5. Pick one consolidation target and complete it end to end, including migration and decommissioning.

Closing thought

IT tool stack optimization is about restoring confidence that when something happens, your team will see it, your workflows will handle it, and your reporting will reflect reality. Start with outcomes, inventory what you have, map work to tools, then make decisions that reduce duplication and improve control.