Tool Sprawl Taxes Your Business More Than You Think

Ross Brouse has a name for what he sees every day.

The Frankenstack.

“The lack of operational simplicity comes from piling on tools, building that Frankenstack, as I call it,” says Brouse, President and COO of Continuous Networks, an MSP serving healthcare clients.

He’s watched it happen over and over. MSPs go to a conference, hear a vendor pitch, grab the battle card, and go sell it. Another tool gets added, another agent deployed, another dashboard to check.

Many MSPs think they understand their security costs.

You’ve got your per-seat math down. EDR at around $4 per month, email security at $5, DNS filtering at $2, patch management at maybe $1 or $2. 

Add some logging or SIEM capability and you’re at a few dollars more.

For a 500-seat MSP, that comes out to roughly $72,000 a year in licensing fees.

This number feels manageable. Predictable. You can budget for it, pass it to clients, and sleep at night.

But this is the wrong number to watch.

Licensing is only 30 to 40 percent of your real security spend. The other 60 to 70 percent? Invisible. And bleeding you dry.

The Real Cost Is Agent Fatigue

“We love our agents, right?” Brouse says.

“We put so many agents across all these machines because people have taught us to tell clients that security is a layered approach. Got to have layers. But what does that really mean?”

Every agent you deploy doesn’t just cost a license fee. It adds noise, another dashboard to check, another vendor to wrangle, another integration point that doesn’t quite work.

This is Agent Fatigue.

Not just alert fatigue. Not just tool sprawl. It’s the operational drag that every additional agent extracts from your team’s time, focus, and capacity.

One small MSP serving multiple verticals put it plainly in our State of MSP Agent Fatigue in 2025 report..

“The complexity of configuring and managing all these different tools is overwhelming. It feels like we need a dedicated team just to keep them running.”

Agent Fatigue is the hidden tax, and it comes in three forms.

Vendor Management Overhead

Every agent means another vendor relationship, another renewal cycle, another support channel, another round of finger-pointing when something breaks.

MSPs report spending dozens of hours per month managing each vendor relationship. Multiply that by 8 to 12 vendors and you’re losing entire weeks to administrative overhead that adds zero value to your clients.

One MSP described the problem in our report.

“Having to install different agents with different tasks and different management dashboards makes it very difficult to have one single pane of glass.

“In case of an incident, we need to review different tools in several dashboards, leading to a waste of time and losing important information.”

Every agent is another vendor to wrangle.

Integration Hell

Brouse sees this constantly.

“Many MSPs never built out their ICP, their ideal client profile,” he says.

“Most of them never really understood or had a go-to market strategy. They never took the time to sit down and ask their clients, hey, what problems are you struggling with?”

The result?

Security stacks built for the MSP, not the client.

“These Frankenstacks get built because you’ve got these MSPs that over time have just added on security tools.”

“They go to a conference, they hear a vendor speak — this is a big problem. Here’s some sales materials, here’s a battle card you can use. Take that in front of your client and sell it to them.”

The client hears it’s a big problem, agrees to pay, and another tool gets deployed.

“But why? Who in your team is evaluating the tool? How does it connect to the business problems that the client is having? If it’s literally just to address risk, that’s fine. But what risks? Have you evaluated any of those risks?”

Our research shows that 80 percent of security teams say lack of integration directly increases the time required to manage security operations.

Only 11 percent report seamless tool integration.

The rest are stuck jumping between portals all day, trying to make sense of disconnected data. Every agent is another silo.

Productivity Drain

This is where the real damage happens.

Almost 50% of security leaders spend more time maintaining their tools than defending against threats, according to our report.

Read that again.

Nearly half your team’s capacity is gone, not to security work but to tool babysitting.

For a 500-seat MSP, that’s the equivalent of one full-time engineer at an $80,000 salary absorbed entirely by managing the stack.

Not responding to incidents, not hunting threats, not growing the business. Just keeping the tools running.

Another MSP summed it up to us in four words. “Clumsy complexity requiring more time, money and people to be involved.”

“There’s no substitute for having a single agent with a whole bunch of tools that come with it, because agent fatigue sucks,” Brouse says.

“The more agents you have to manage and the more security companies you have to work with, the harder it gets to go through IR. It’s a bad position to be in. So the fewer agents, the better.”

Every agent steals time your team should be spending on real threats.

The Real Number

Let’s do the math on that 500-seat MSP.

You have $90,000 in licensing, which is your visible cost.

Now add the hidden tax. Vendor management overhead, integration friction, and the productivity drain from managing multiple disconnected tools eats up the equivalent of one or more full-time engineers.

At a fully loaded cost of $100,000 per FTE, your total real spend climbs to $200,000 or more annually.

The hidden tax is bigger than your licensing spend.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Research from Ponemon Institute shows roughly 45 percent of SIEM alerts are false positives.

One in four security alerts across all tools turns out to be nothing. MSPs using seven or more tools experience 64 percent more alert fatigue than those using four or fewer, and MSPs with high alert fatigue are three times more likely to miss real threats.

Agent Fatigue isn’t just an efficiency problem. It’s a security liability.

Case in point.

The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that in 74 percent of breaches, alerts were generated but ignored by the SOC, usually because analysts were overloaded by the sheer volume of incoming alarms.

The Consolidation Alternative

Now the good news.

Consolidation changes the math entirely.

Let’s say unified platforms average around $10 to $12 per seat. Call it $60,000 annually for those same 500 seats, and you’ve immediately cut licensing by a third.

But the bigger win is what happens to the Agent Fatigue overhead.

Fewer vendors means less wrangling. Better integration means less context-switching. One dashboard instead of eight means your team stops playing whack-a-mole across portals.

The productivity drain doesn’t disappear completely, but it drops by 60 to 70 percent. Instead of losing $100,000 in capacity to tool babysitting, you’re down to $30,000 or $35,000 in residual overhead.

New total cost is roughly $95,000 per year.

Annual savings come out to more than $100,000, and break-even on transition costs happens in 6 to 12 months.

The 20 percent of MSPs who’ve already consolidated, according to our Agent Fatigue study, report dramatically reduced false positives, faster threat response, and teams that aren’t burned out

The case studies bear this out.

4Cambridge, a UK MSP and Heimdal customer, dealt with multiple security vendors across their client base. Some clients were running separate tools for antivirus, ransomware protection, patch management, and email security.

After consolidating to Heimdal’s unified XDR platform, Director Jon Stanton noted that “visibility into client systems has greatly improved. We use these insights to respond quickly and ensure that clients remain safe.”

One enterprise MSP using over 10 tools told us what many are thinking: “Too many tools. I wish we had one solution that does it all.”

Brouse has advice for MSPs still stuck in the Frankenstack.

“Cover your gaps. The only way you can cover your gaps is if you know what they are. Start there. What are your gaps? Figure out what tools can solve those problems and use the fewest number of tools as possible.”

He’s particularly direct with newer MSPs, and says they’ve got to manage to a security framework. Take the time to understand what you’re going to use right out of the gate and have some process for it.

Don’t just start selling things because you’re making money. If you let the money drive your decision-making, you’ve got your priorities in the wrong place.

How Much Is Agent Fatigue Costing You?

MSPs worry about vendor lock-in, but here’s the reality. You’re already locked in. Locked into complexity.

The hidden tax compounds every quarter you delay

 Your team is spending half its time maintaining the stack instead of defending clients, and you’re losing $50,000 to $100,000 or more annually to operational drag you can’t even see on a balance sheet.

Consolidation isn’t about cutting costs. It’s about cutting Agent Fatigue. Fewer agents, less noise, more capacity.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to consolidate. It’s how much Agent Fatigue is costing you right now.

Danny Mitchell

Head of Content at Heimdal. A journalist by trade who cares about helping MSPs and security teams make better decisions, enjoy their work, and see real results.