31% of teams are consolidating tools, yet the average stack keeps growing.
Our Inaugural AI + DevOps Report set out to capture how engineering teams are really working today. One theme jumped out immediately: tool sprawl. Even as 31% of teams say they’re consolidating tools, the average stack keeps growing larger and more fragmented.
Every team wants to move faster. The instinct is often to add more tools: a new CI/CD plugin, another monitoring service, or a compliance add-on to satisfy auditors. Of course, what starts as a lean setup quickly becomes a patchwork of dashboards, alerts, and integrations.
It’s not just messy. It’s also expensive.
The Hidden Costs of Fragmented Toolchains
At first, tool sprawl feels harmless. Each new purchase fixes a pain point. But over time, the costs compound in ways that are easy to overlook.
- Duplicate features: Our report found that 44% of teams report tool sprawl as a top pain point and juggling more than 10 DevOps tools, and many admit several overlap in functionality.
- Integration debt: Nearly 40% of respondents said integrations consume more than a quarter of their engineering time. Every new service has to connect with the rest, or someone spends late nights making it work.
- Context switching: Engineers lose focus bouncing between consoles. Over half of teams (52%) flagged context switching as a major productivity drain.
- Audit stress: With security and compliance ranked as the top challenge for 62% of respondents, audits drag on because evidence is scattered across too many tools.
It can come as no surprise, then, that tool consolidation is rising to the top of the agenda. Leaders are realizing that adding more tools doesn’t create more speed. In most cases, it creates drag.
Why Integrated Platforms Win
The strongest teams in our survey aren’t chasing shiny new services.
They’re simplifying.
They’re consolidating.
They’re investing in platforms that connect the dots.
When CI/CD, compliance, monitoring, and cost controls all live under one roof, everything changes. Developers gain self-service environments without filing tickets. Compliance shifts from being bolted on to being embedded at the infrastructure layer. And AI gains the context to connect logs, policies, and pipelines into real actions.
Consolidation isn’t about shrinking your stack for its own sake. It’s about creating the conditions where automation and AI can actually deliver.
The AI Advantage
Investment in AI is accelerating. Two-thirds of teams in our report said they increased AI spend in the past year. But AI only works if it has the full picture. On top of a fragmented toolchain, it becomes another noisy assistant. On top of an integrated platform, it becomes a real teammate, able to remediate drift, enforce policies, and cut cloud costs in real time.
That’s why integrated AI-powered platforms like DuploCloud are gaining traction. They reduce overhead, reclaim time, and allow engineers to focus on building instead of managing tools.
Key Insight
More tools don’t guarantee more speed. In fact, they often do the opposite. The teams escaping the tool sprawl trap aren’t chasing every new service. They’re focusing on integration and simplification, which unlocks productivity at scale.
📖 See the full findings in our inaugural AI + DevOps Report, where 135+ engineers, platform leads, and CTOs reveal how tool sprawl is shaping their productivity and how they’re rethinking their stacks.
