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Since the 1990s, IT vendors have promised tech leaders a unified dashboard to manage all systems effortlessly, but it remains unrealized even after 30 years
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Ever since the 1990s, IT vendors have dangled a shining promise in front of CIOs and IT leaders: the single pane of glass. A magical dashboard where all systems, services, security layers, and network components can be monitored, managed, and understoodâthrough one unified interface.
Itâs a seductive idea. Clean, simple, centralised. A place where IT finally gets its act together and everything works in perfect harmony. The problem? It hasnât happened in the last 30 years, and it wonât happen in the next 30 either.
The idea of a single pane of glass has always been a marketing fantasy disguised as inevitability. From early systems management platforms in the â90s to todayâs SaaS-based observability suites, the promise remains: âBuy our solution, and youâll finally see everything clearly.â
Yet, for all the dashboards, log aggregators, SNMP pollers, and AI-enhanced analytics tools, IT teams still find themselves hopping between interfaces, reconciling data sources, and trying to understand conflicting alerts. Thereâs always one more tool to integrate. One more data silo. One more outlier.
Hereâs the core problem: IT environments are inherently heterogeneous. No two businesses run identical stacks. Legacy mainframes co-exist with containerised apps. On-prem storage shares space with hyperscaler clouds. Endpoint security platforms donât always speak the same language as identity providers. Network telemetry tools may not line up with application performance metrics.
Attempting to visualise and manage everything from a single UI requires abstracting multiple domains, each with their own models, data structures, and operational logic. And while vendors may stitch together integrations, the result is often shallow, brittle, and difficult to maintain. You donât end up with a unified platformâyou end up with a Frankensteinâs monster of stitched-together modules.
The hard truth is this: businesses donât need a single pane of glass. What they need are solutions that solve real business problems.
Whether itâs delivering secure remote access, ensuring uptime for a customer-facing service, or preventing data exfiltrationâevery tool or platform should be chosen based on how well it meets a business requirement. If it happens to integrate with others nicely? Bonus. If it can feed its data into a broader platform for correlation? Even better.
But the priority must always be the outcome, not the dream of visual harmony.
The myth isnât going away anytime soon. In fact, itâs getting more ambitious.
Vendors now pitch convergence across entire domains: cybersecurity, networking, and applicationsâall in one interface. Itâs the ânext-genâ single pane of glass, they say. The platform that gives you SASE, SIEM, SD-WAN, and APM in a single tab.
But convergence and consolidation are not the same as coherence. The more you cram into one tool, the more compromises you make in depth, flexibility, and real-world usability. It's no wonder so many âunified platformsâ are really just loosely-coupled modules behind a login screen.
So what can we aim for?
The most realistic and effective strategy today is seamless integration in a service chain. This doesnât mean forcing everything into one platformâit means enabling interoperability between best-in-class tools across the stack.
Whether itâs using APIs to automate incident response, feeding network telemetry into a SIEM, or connecting observability data to a service desk workflowâwell-integrated solutions can provide context-rich visibility and orchestrated response without trying to pretend they're one pane of glass.
The goal is interconnected glass, not a single sheet.
IT leaders should treat any âsingle pane of glassâ pitch with a healthy dose of scepticism. Itâs not that visibility isnât importantâit absolutely is. But pretending thereâs one tool to rule them all often distracts from doing the hard work: understanding your environment, mapping dependencies, and designing systems that are resilient, observable, and aligned to business needs.
In the end, the most important pane is the one that helps your team do their job better. Even if itâs not the only one.