Cloud Expo on Ulitzer

IBM Tuesday December 8 is supposed to wheel out some cloudware to monitor, predict and prevent data center outages that – being cloudware – will go for a monthly subscription.

The company says Tivoli Live Monitoring Services will give IT staff a central point of control to oversee the piecemeal parts of the data center.

The enterprise-class software can play nanny to operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and software applications.

It’s supposed to identify and address potential outages and bottlenecks that threaten application availability before impacting the end user.

IBM says that when the service detects a potential problem – such as running out of resource capacity – it automatically alerts IT operations and displays the relevant information on a dashboard to help analyze and correct the issue.

Using IBM’s chi-chi autonomic computing capabilities, the service can be programmed to automate certain tasks to enable the affected system to “self-heal” when faced with certain issues.

Tivoli general manager Al Zollar (pictured) describes the widgetry as IBM’s “smartest data center software” and says it’s simple enough that most companies could sign up for it on a Monday and have it running by Friday.

Being cloudware customers need not deploy hardware, buy software licenses or configure the software.

IBM will provide the service both on its own cloud and as on-premise software, managed services and software appliances. It promises more of the same down the road.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services involves pre-configured and dedicated instances of Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.1, Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications 6.2 and Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Applications 6.2.

IBM says it can monitor up to 500 resources and includes so-called touchless monitoring, agent-less monitoring per operating system and/or device; distributed monitoring, agent-based operating system and application monitoring per operating system and/or application; and performance services, historical reporting per operating system useful for capacity planning.

IBM didn’t detail the price but the cost includes a one-time setup fee for on-boarding costs. Terms are a minimum of 90 days and run from one to three years. The operating systems supported include Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Windows.

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