3 Ways Small Businesses Can Optimize Costs and Drive Growth With Better IT Visibility

1. Reduce Tool Sprawl With Targeted Observability Investments

One of the biggest cost traps for small businesses is overlapping or underutilized IT tools. Adding more monitoring platforms doesn’t improve visibility if they don’t work together — it just increases licensing, training and maintenance costs.

Instead, SMBs benefit from selecting a smaller, integrated set of observability tools that deliver actionable insight across systems.

OpenTelemetry, for example, improves observability through standardized instrumentation. It allows teams to observe infrastructure, applications and user experience in real time, without locking them into proprietary tooling. That flexibility helps SMBs avoid costly replatforming as their environments evolve.

Because small IT teams rarely have the bandwidth to evaluate and deploy tools alone, working with a trusted technology partner can help ensure investments are right-sized, integrated properly and aligned to business goals.

“I think starting with us is a good way to go, and then we can help to make a determination as to which way an organization should go from there,” says Mark Beckendorf, head of full-stack observability for digital velocity at CDW.

One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to observability, he explains. CDW helps businesses identify blind spots unique to their environments and avoid unnecessary spending.

“It is truly core to digital transformation,” Beckendorf says. “It’s how you run your IT operations as a whole.”

FIND OUT: See how to maintain the health and performance of your IT with observability services.

2. Control Cloud Costs With Unified Visibility

Many SMBs adopt cloud services incrementally, adding platforms as needs arise. Without centralized visibility, however, this approach can quickly lead to unexpected costs, underused resources and fragmented management.

There’s a difference between using multiple clouds and operating a true multicloud environment, says Nicholas Holian, worldwide field CTO at Nutanix. With multicloud management platforms, SMBs gain a single view of resources across public and private clouds, making it easier to optimize spending and performance.

These platforms help IT teams:

• Track cloud usage and costs
• Identify underutilized resources
• Monitor performance from one dashboard

VMware, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services all offer cloud management platforms and managed services that improve visibility and cost control. Some organizations may also explore supercloud architectures, which complement multicloud environments by improving data access and governance.

How insights are visualized is less important than eliminating data silos, Beckendorf says. Whether teams use dashboards, heat maps or interactive charts, the priority is centralizing information.

“Collecting all of that data into a common location is really critical,” he says.

For SMBs, unified visibility means fewer surprises on cloud bills, faster troubleshooting and more predictable scaling as the business grows.

3. Use AIOps to Minimize Downtime and Support Growth

Downtime is expensive for any organization. But for small businesses, it can stall growth, disrupt customers and overwhelm limited IT staff.

Without strong observability, teams are often forced to hunt through disconnected data sources to diagnose problems.

“That’s searching for a needle in a haystack,” says Davandra Panchal, senior solutions architect at CDW. “That will take a long time and will have a huge impact on an application’s service time.”

AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) helps SMBs do more with less by applying AI and machine learning to observability data. These tools help teams move from reacting to issues to preventing them.

AIOps platforms can:

• Aggregate logs, metrics and traces into a single view
• Predict outages or performance degradation
• Automate anomaly detection to reduce alert fatigue
• Shorten mean time to resolution

IBM’s Instana Observability solution, for example, delivers real-time visibility across more than 300 platforms. It updates full-stack data every second and uses graphing models and dynamic maps to identify root causes quickly, helping teams resolve issues before users are impacted.

With many AIOps options available, a technology partner can help SMBs choose solutions that match their scale, complexity and budget.

For organizations hesitant to adopt AIOps, the risk is clear: higher downtime costs, slower incident response and limited ability to scale.

“If businesses don’t do any of this, this is really going to impact their service greatly,” Panchal says. “It really is an inhibitor for them to grow.”

READ MORE: How to achieve full-stack observability in your business.