Why don't existing IT tools help with visibility?

We started Stitchflow to solve a specific problem: IT teams lack visibility.

Modern IT environments are fragmented, with teams managing dozens—sometimes hundreds—of tools. Core IT systems like Okta, JAMF, and Active Directory; company-wide platforms like Slack, Zoom, and Office 365; and function-specific SaaS apps like Salesforce, Asana, and Airtable all operate in silos.

Each comes with complex configurations spanning employees, contractors, groups, apps, and channels. The result is a tangled mesh that’s nearly impossible to decipher.

It’s no surprise then that only 5% of IT decision-makers say they have complete visibility across their environment. The rest are left managing blind spots, gaps, and inefficiencies.

In this article, we’ll look at the four main approaches IT teams rely on today for visibility—traditional IT tools, homegrown dashboards, point solutions, and workflow automation. We’ll explore what they help with, where they fall short, and why none of them fully solve the problem.

TL;DR

• Types of visibility gaps include employee access issues, resource drift across groups and channels, compliance and device security lapses, and underused or hidden SaaS licenses.
• IT tools provide strong reporting within their own environment but stay siloed, offering no cross-platform visibility.
• Point solutions deliver deep insights into niche areas such as access governance or license usage, but they’re narrow in scope, costly to integrate, and leave blind spots.
• Workflow automation tools reduce manual effort through repeatable processes, yet they generate noise, are hard to maintain, and don’t actually improve visibility.
• Homegrown dashboards can be highly tailored and consolidate data from multiple systems, but they’re resource-intensive, fragile to API changes, and quickly become outdated.
• Stitchflow closes these gaps with unified, actionable, and continuously updated visibility across 100% of apps and users, including disconnected and non-API tools.

Types of IT visibility gaps

Visibility challenges in IT aren’t just abstract problems—they have a real impact on security, compliance, productivity, and costs. At Stitchflow, we’ve seen recurring patterns in the gaps caused by limited visibility:

• An organization was paying for hundreds of Okta licenses assigned to users who had already left, because those licenses were tied to groups not included in the offboarding workflow.
• Contractors at another company had access to systems containing customer PII, despite missing mandatory security training.
• Sales hires between January and April 2023 missed new leads from website sign-ups because they weren’t added to a critical Google mailing list.

In each case, the root cause was the same: the IT team simply didn’t have visibility into these gaps. Here are some common reasons for visibility gaps in IT:

Employee management

Improper access to resources is a persistent problem. In most organizations, 5–10% of employees retain access after leaving the company, while 10–15% of current employees don’t have the access they need to do their jobs.

These gaps aren’t just minor oversights—they create real security risks, audit issues, and unnecessary costs. When IT teams can’t see who has access to what, they can’t enforce policies, onboard or offboard employees reliably, or ensure compliance.

👉 Get a free offboarding assurance report to find orphaned accounts, prove complete deprovisioning, and stay audit-ready.

Resource drift

Group and channel membership errors are surprisingly common. Over 10% of users face inconsistencies across Slack, Teams, Okta/AD groups, and Google groups. High-turnover teams, like Sales, feel it most.

When employees aren’t properly added or removed from the right channels, IT teams lose track of who has access to what, which creates confusion, delays, and hidden risks.

Compliance and device security

Missing security controls or mismanaged devices can quietly put an organization at risk:

• 2-5% of employees may be without MFA
• 5-10% of devices may lack MDM, antivirus, or backup
• 2-5% of devices may not have FileVault

These aren’t huge percentages, but across hundreds or thousands of users, they become serious compliance and security exposures.

SaaS app gaps

Underused or unused SaaS licenses are another blind spot. More than 25% of licenses in most organizations aren’t being used effectively. Without visibility, IT teams can’t optimize spend, leaving significant costs on the table while teams struggle to manage the tools they actually rely on.

Even small gaps like these, when multiplied across large organizations, create significant risk and inefficiency.

👉 Get a free SaaS license savings report to uncover waste, rebalance license tiers, and prepare confidently for your next renewal.

The existing IT visibility tools and their limitations

Despite many tools in play, the lack of visibility in IT leaves teams with partial insights and blind spots, stopping them from achieving true end-to-end visibility.

1. IT tools themselves

Core IT systems like Okta, Azure AD, JAMF, Slack, or monitoring platforms such as Splunk and Datadog are built to manage their own environments. They go deep within their domains but don’t connect the dots across tools.

‼️The lack of cross-system visibility isn’t an accident—it’s often by design. Vendors treat data as a competitive moat, making it harder for customers to switch and locking insights within their ecosystem.

On top of that, each tool uses different data models and refresh rates, so even when APIs are available, correlating data is messy and incomplete.

The performance of IT tools against IT visibility gaps

Pros of IT tools for IT data visibility

• Provides reasonable reporting within their own environment
• Monitoring and observability tools give real-time alerts and insights
• Useful for auditing activity within a single tool

Cons of IT tools for IT data visibility

• Reporting varies widely in robustness; some tools are weak or limited
• Focused on the tool itself, not relationships across systems
• No vendor incentive to provide cross-platform or multi-domain visibility, leaving gaps in multi-tool analysis

📚Also read: Why is this single pane of glass for IT teams so damn hard to build?

2. Point solutions

Point solutions—like identity governance tools (Okta IGA, Lumos) or SaaS license managers (Productiv)—tackle narrow, high-value problems. They fit the “best-of-breed” trend from the 2010s, but the sheer number of them now creates integration headaches.

Point solutions come with vendor risk—companies can pivot, get acquired, or sunset products, leaving IT teams stranded. They also require specialized knowledge to manage, which drives training overhead and silos expertise.

The performance of point solutions against IT visibility gaps

Pros of point solutions for IT data visibility

• Deep insights for their specific use case
• User interfaces tailored to the intended workflow
• Can help address compliance or license management in targeted areas

Cons of point solutions for IT data visibility

• Narrow focus; not designed for holistic IT visibility
• Identity governance tools focus on access certification rather than full gap detection
• Integrating multiple point solutions is costly and complex
• Legacy systems may be poorly supported, leaving blind spots
• Often require significant configuration and maintenance to remain useful

3. Workflow automation solutions

Automation tools such as Okta Workflows, Microsoft Power Automate, and BetterCloud streamline repetitive tasks like provisioning and license assignments. They’re great for efficiency but offer little in terms of visibility.

⚠️Automation can actually reduce visibility. Workflows often “fail silently,” looking successful while leaving processes incomplete or incorrect. These tools also create hidden dependencies—simple workflows can mask fragile interconnections that only surface during failures.

The performance of workflow automation tools against IT visibility gaps

Pros of workflow automation solutions for IT data visibility

• Automates well-defined, repeatable processes
• Reduces manual effort and errors
• Helps enforce policies consistently if workflows are correctly configured

Cons of workflow automation solutions for IT data visibility

• Automation ≠ visibility; not designed to identify gaps
• Complex workflows are hard to set up and maintain
  Data overload from alerts and logs can make it difficult to interpret insights
• Lacks mechanisms to verify whether workflows execute successfully
• Scaling automation across multiple systems can introduce additional blind spots

📚Also read: Why hasn’t workflow automation worked for IT

4. Homegrown dashboards

From spreadsheets to SQL + BI setups like Tableau or Power BI, many organizations build their own visibility layers. These solutions reflect both gaps in vendor offerings and unique organizational needs.

The hidden cost here is maintenance. APIs change, business logic evolves, and before long, teams spend more time fixing dashboards than using the insights. Exceptions exist—organizations with strong dev capacity and formal change management can make this work—but for most, technical debt piles up quickly.

The performance of homegrown dashboards against IT visibility gaps

Pros of homegrown dashboards for IT data visibility

• Can provide highly relevant insights across multiple tools
• Flexible and tailored to organizational priorities
• Allows teams to consolidate disparate data sources in one view

Cons of homegrown dashboards for IT data visibility

• Resource-intensive to build and maintain
• APIs and environments change frequently, requiring continuous updates
• Without automation, dashboards quickly become outdated
• Complexity grows as more tools and data sources are added
• Teams often spend more time maintaining dashboards than actually acting on the insights

💡The visibility problem isn’t just technical. It’s shaped by vendor economics (profit from lock-in), organizational incentives (teams measured on uptime, not integration), and the sheer pace of SaaS adoption outstripping integration capabilities.

📚Also read: Why modern IT teams need a data lake to manage SaaS sprawl

How Stitchflow is uniquely focused on IT visibility

Existing IT visibility tools all fall short in different ways: IT tools stay siloed, point solutions are narrow, workflow automation creates noise without clarity, and homegrown dashboards collapse under their own maintenance burden.

Stitchflow was built to close those gaps by making visibility both foundational and actionable:

• Cross-system unification (vs. IT tools): Instead of siloed reporting, Stitchflow’s IT Graph continuously reconciles data from IDPs, HR systems, connected apps, and disconnected tools—even CSV-only or non-API apps. IT leaders finally see a complete, reconciled picture of who has access to what, across every domain, group, and contractor.
• Execution-first intelligence (vs. point solutions): Instead of static insights, Stitchflow runs 100+ automated checks across access, group drift, unused apps, and compliance controls. Gaps are surfaced with full context and linked to one-click remediation.
• Data that’s always current (vs. homegrown dashboards): Unlike dashboards that decay without constant upkeep, Stitchflow continuously updates data pipelines, incorporating exceptions, HR changes, and even AI-driven risk scoring for new tools. Visibility isn’t a quarterly project—it’s live, accurate, and audit-ready every day.
• 100% SaaS coverage (vs. workflow automation & IDPs): Where automation and IDPs only cover apps with strong APIs, Stitchflow covers all of them—from legacy on-prem to new AI SaaS tools without SSO/SCIM support. No hidden, orphaned, or underutilized accounts escape detection.

With Stitchflow, IT teams gain full visibility across their SaaS environment and the power to act on it. This means 360° data visibility, continuous correctness, and confidence that your IT environment is always secure, compliant, and cost-optimized.

Book a demo to see how Stitchflow delivers the visibility today’s IT environments demand—holistic, actionable, and effortless to maintain. Or get a done-for-you report on user access review, SaaS license usage, or even shadow IT—your first report is free.