Global System Integrators have never operated in a more demanding environment. The promise of cloud was simplification. What most GSIs have ended up with is the opposite: a sprawling, multi-layered operational estate spanning private data centers, multiple public clouds, hundreds of enterprise customers, and a monitoring toolchain that looks less like a control plane and more like a patchwork quilt.
A mid-size GSI today might manage infrastructure across VMware vCenter, Nutanix, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud simultaneously, each with its own telemetry format, alert schema, and operational dashboard. Add in ServiceNow for service management, Okta or Entra ID for identity, OpenTelemetry-instrumented applications, and real user monitoring feeds, and the operational picture becomes genuinely difficult to hold together.
The consequences are predictable. Alert fatigue sets in. NOC, cloud ops, and application teams operate in silos, each seeing their slice of the estate but none seeing the whole. When an incident strikes, root cause analysis becomes a triage exercise across six dashboards instead of a decisive diagnostic conversation. And the enterprise customers on the other end see delays, missed SLAs, and opaque status pages.
This isn’t a tooling problem that more tooling will solve. It’s a fundamental architecture problem.
Saritha Patric