Toggle tax is a term used to define the loss of productivity users experience when switching or toggling between apps, tools, or websites. Each additional app, tool, or screen the user has to switch between necessitates a certain amount of 'context switching' that exacts a toll on the user's cognitive load.

Studies have estimated that an average worker toggles between 1200 and 3600 times on a daily basis! The time and effort needed to maintain productivity through all that is mind-blowing, literally.

When it comes to IT, toggle tax is the symptom of a larger issue: Tool sprawl. Tool sprawl arises when an IT organization licenses many tools with limited interoperability, overlapping functionalities, and expensive pricing. Tool sprawl creates a host of challenges for IT teams to resolve:

• Lack of productivity due to toggle tax, as mentioned above.

• Delays in data correlation, as different tools often have contrasting interfaces and data formats.

• 'Silos' or barriers in data transfer between different tools.

• Limited cooperation between teams due to varying authentication measures

Let's see how toggle tax and tool sprawl affect network configuration management with two scenarios:

• Delayed IT incident response: Configuration changes have to be correlated with data from monitoring tools to track down the root cause for IT faults.

• Lack of centralized management: IT teams often use different tools or different installations of the same tool to manage configurations for distributed networks.

How to avoid tool sprawl and toggle tax from affecting your network configuration management

Unified full-stack observability: A unified IT observability solution reduces the number of screens required to monitor and manage your entire IT stack to just one.

Centralized network configuration management: Managing the configurations, backups, and compliance for multiple sites from a central interface improves IT efficiency.

You can now upgrade your Network Configuration Manager license to get full-stack observability and centralized configuration management. Learn more about this in our page.