When I speak with IT leaders, I almost always hear the same story: There is enough monitoring. In fact, there is too much of it. Dashboards, alerts, metrics - everything is there. And yet, at the decisive moment, one simple question remains unanswered: What is really affected right now, and how critical is it?
This is exactly the experience we wanted to validate with reliable data. That is why USU commissioned Forrester Consulting in 2026 to conduct a study. The study surveyed 423 decision-makers responsible for IT monitoring strategy in their organizations across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the United States. The results confirm what many teams experience every day and show where modern IT monitoring is headed. The full results are available in the Forrester study on IT monitoring.
The clearest finding first: 83% of the surveyed organizations use three or more monitoring tools. Over the years, organizations have added another specialized tool for every new environment - cloud, containers, applications, infrastructure. The result is rarely more clarity. More often, it is a fragmented landscape of isolated solutions.
That fragmentation has consequences. Only 63% rate their tools as “effective” at providing a unified view across all systems and environments. Put differently: More than one-third of organizations lack exactly this end-to-end view. In business-critical disruptions, that gap matters: 41% name slow issue detection and root-cause analysis as one of their biggest challenges.
The real problem is not visibility. It is context.
For me, this is the central finding of the study: Organizations are not asking for more data. They are asking for context. When asked what would help them most in critical, service-relevant incidents, respondents named clear dependency mapping between applications, infrastructure and third-party services first (42%) - ahead of more detailed metrics.
This matches what teams need: not another signal, but the connection between signal, service and impact.
This leaves many organizations between two unsatisfying options. On one side, traditional monitoring: reliable baseline data, but without service context. On the other, comprehensive observability: technically deep, but complex and costly to operate.
This dilemma is not a side note. It is a common reality: 34% of respondents explicitly feel caught between monitoring tools that are too basic and platforms that are too complex for day-to-day operations. This is exactly the gap in which many IT operations teams work today.
This is where I believe a third way comes in: Multi Cloud Monitoring as a practical middle ground between traditional monitoring and observability. Service-oriented instead of purely technical, with Event Intelligence instead of data overload and predictable costs instead of volume-based models.
The Forrester study also shows what organizations expect from the next generation of monitoring solutions: faster issue resolution (62%), higher service reliability (60%) and less operational effort through more automation (48%).
The common thread is clear: away from isolated infrastructure metrics and toward a service-oriented view, with event correlation, dependency transparency and clear prioritization based on business impact. Not more telemetry for its own sake, but operational clarity that enables faster and safer decisions.
Traditional monitoring is reaching its limits. But the answer is not one more tool or even more data. Nor is it automatically a full observability platform that is often too complex and too expensive for day-to-day operations. The answer is context: a central view that correlates events, makes dependencies visible and focuses on what really affects operations. This is exactly the middle ground we are pursuing at USU with Multi Cloud Monitoring - service-oriented, with Event Intelligence and predictable costs.
You can also read how we classify the study results in our press release "The Future of IT Monitoring: From Tool Chaos to Service Intelligence".
→ Download the full Forrester study for free
Want to discuss the future of IT monitoring? Dr. Benjamin Strehl, Managing Director at USU, picks up the study findings on LinkedIn. Add your perspective.
The study "How Organizations Are Modernizing IT Monitoring To Reduce Complexity and Improve Clarity" was conducted in 2026 by Forrester on behalf of USU in 2026. 423 IT decision-makers from the United States, France, Austria, Germany and Switzerland were surveyed.
About the author: Frank Laschet has been part of the USU marketing team since 2022 and is Senior Product & Field Marketing Manager IT Monitoring.