Sample executive briefing
What leadership receives after one afternoon of inventory.
This is a complete briefing for Harborline Logistics (fictional), an invented company with eight monitoring tools, three committee members and a six-week paging export. Nothing here is a real customer; every figure is computed by the same code that will compute yours. It describes; it does not recommend.
Harborline Logistics (fictional)
Observability stack audit, Q3
At a glance
- 8 monitoring and observability tools in the inventory; known annual spend $500,800.
- 9 of 30 capabilities are covered fully by two or more tools; $144,583 per year (29% of known spend) sits on that overlap.
- 4 capabilities are covered by nobody; 1 tool is fully shadowed by others.
- An engineer opens 2 different tools to work an incident end to end.
- 5 renewals in the next 180 days, the soonest Splunk Cloud in 41 days.
- Observability maturity 36/100 (Developing) from 3 respondents; stakeholders disagree on 2 questions.
- Latest alert export (367 rows): 59.7 alerts per week, 72.2% after hours, 49% with no recorded action.
Inventory and overlap
Overlap is measured from the capability map the committee confirmed for each tool: a capability is overlapped when two or more tools cover it fully. Spend on overlap is the smaller allocation of each duplicated capability, so it is the amount that could go away if each capability were served once; it is not a savings promise.
- Spend on overlap
- Other spend
| Tool | Annual cost | Capabilities | Overlapped | Unique | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | $186,000 | 9 | 7 | 2 | 78% overlap |
| Splunk Cloud | $142,000 | 6 | 2 | 4 | |
| New Relic | $64,000 | 8 | 7 | 1 | 88% overlap |
| PagerDuty | $38,000 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 50% overlap |
| Grafana Cloud | $21,000 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 75% overlap |
| Sentry | $18,000 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 50% overlap |
| SolarWinds | $27,000 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 60% overlap |
| Atlassian Statuspage | $4,800 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Fully shadowed |
Coverage gaps, ranked for this environment
Ranked by a stated rule set against the environment profile the committee entered (cloud, Kubernetes, customer-facing web, compliance). The reason for each rank is shown.
- Covered fully by two or more tools930%
- Covered fully by one tool1447%
- Partly covered only310%
- Covered by nobody413%
| Capability | Risk | Score | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud cost & FinOps visibility | medium | 50 | Public cloud spend with no telemetry-linked cost visibility. |
| ITSM & ticketing integration | low | 30 | Larger engineering organization: unlinked tickets and alerts lose context. |
| OpenTelemetry-native ingest (partial only) | low | 15 | Modern platform without a vendor-neutral telemetry standard increases lock-in. Partially covered by at least one tool; depth is limited. |
| Telemetry pipeline & routing | low | 10 | |
| Event correlation & AIOps (partial only) | low | 6 | Partially covered by at least one tool; depth is limited. |
| Runbook automation & remediation (partial only) | low | 6 | Partially covered by at least one tool; depth is limited. |
| Serverless & function monitoring | low | 5 |
Cost by team and per seat
Known annual spend $500,800 across 412 entered seats, $1,204 per seat per year overall. Every cost is attributed to a team.
If nothing changes and vendors raise prices 7% a year, three-year spend is $1,610,022.
- Application$187,66737%
- Platform$181,46736%
- Security$71,00014%
- Other (2 teams)$60,66712%
| Team | Annual cost | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Application | $187,667 | Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty, Sentry |
| Platform | $181,467 | Datadog, Splunk Cloud, PagerDuty, Atlassian Statuspage |
| Security | $71,000 | Splunk Cloud |
| Data | $33,667 | PagerDuty, Grafana Cloud |
| Infrastructure | $27,000 | SolarWinds |
Consolidation options on the table
Each option was drafted from the inventory and is a description of a possible end state, not a recommendation. Coverage retained and tools touched are the committee’s figures to test.
| Option | Post-change cost | Est. annual savings | Coverage retained | Tools per incident |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serve logs from one platform | $402,800 | $98,000 | 97% | 4 |
| Retire the second application monitor at renewal | $436,800 | $64,000 | 100% | 5 |
Renewals in the next twelve months
Owners and admins receive a reminder 120, 90, 60 and 30 days before each date with the figures below.
No renewal date entered for: Atlassian Statuspage.
| Tool | Renews | Days | Annual cost | Overlap | Shadowed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Splunk Cloud | 2026-12-17 | 41 | $142,000 | 33% | no |
| Datadog | 2027-01-19 | 74 | $186,000 | 78% | no |
| SolarWinds | 2027-02-10 | 96 | $27,000 | 60% | no |
| Grafana Cloud | 2027-03-04 | 118 | $21,000 | 75% | no |
| New Relic | 2027-04-07 | 152 | $64,000 | 88% | no |
Change since the last snapshot
Over 89 days: 1 tool added (Grafana Cloud); known spend up $44,000 (+9.6%); spend on overlap up $19,083.
Snapshots: 8/7/2026 to 11/4/2026.
Observability maturity
Combined score 36 of 100, band Developing. Lowest dimension: Cost and tool governance at 17, below the reference band for a mid-sized organization.
Stakeholders disagree (spread of two or more levels) on 2 questions; those are the conversations to have first.
| Dimension | Score | Band | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage and instrumentation | 58 | Defined | 45 to 70 |
| Alerting hygiene | 33 | Developing | 35 to 60 |
| On-call and incident response | 42 | Developing | 40 to 65 |
| Diagnosis and root cause | 42 | Developing | 35 to 60 |
| Service objectives and reporting | 25 | Developing | 25 to 55 |
| Cost and tool governance | 17 | Initial | 20 to 50 |
Alert noise and on-call load
From "PagerDuty export, last six weeks" analysed 11/3/2026: 367 rows over 43 days.
59.7 alerts per week over 43 days (367 dated rows).
72.2% of alerts arrive after hours or on weekends; that is the load on-call carries at night.
49% of alerts have no recorded action or note; a large share may be noise or auto-resolving.
16.1% of alerts repeat the same source and title within 10 minutes; grouping or suppression rules would reduce pages without losing signal.
One source (orders-api) produces 34.3% of all alerts.
| Noisiest source | Alerts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| orders-api | 126 | 34.3% |
| edge-gateway | 99 | 27% |
| warehouse-sync | 96 | 26.2% |
| billing-db | 46 | 12.5% |
Documents reviewed
2 postmortem reviews and 1 contract or quote review are on file for this project; open them from the project page.
What would make this briefing more complete
- Add renewal dates for 1 tool so the reminders can run.
ITMonitoring.com Evaluate is independent and vendor-neutral. This briefing identifies and measures; it does not rank vendors or tell you what to buy, renew or cancel.
Your own version
The same page, with your inventory behind it.
Create a committee account, enter the tools you pay for, and this briefing fills in as you go. It downloads as Word and PDF, and the ten advisory views behind it are all included.