IBM Offers Data Centre Monitoring Via The Cloud

IT managers not longer need to drive out to check on their data centres, but has now monitor it remotely after Big Blue announced Tivoli Live Monitoring Services.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services is a subscription-based offering that is hosted by IBM Global Services, on a Big Blue cloud computing environment. Key targets for the new service are midmarket companies, according to Al Zollar, general manager of IBM’s Tivoli business.

“This will give the smaller businesses the same powerful monitoring [capabilities] that the larger enterprises have,” Zollar said in an interview.

There is a growing demand on vendors to offer their software through a variety of avenues, giving business options rather than just bringing the software on premises, he said. Offering the Tivoli monitoring software through a monthly subscription service via the web is just one more way of getting the products to the customers.

It’s also a key differentiator for IBM, Zollar said. Some software makers don’t offer such a cloud option, some only offer their software over the web, and some offer both, though customers can only get a stripped-down version of the product over the web.

He said the Tivoli software that customers now can get as a service off the IBM cloud is identical to what they can buy through more traditional methods.

“There’s a demand from organisations to have flexibility in how they deploy [software products],” Zollar said.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services includes Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Composite Application Management, which businesses can use to monitor their data centre resources, such as operating systems, virtualised servers and applications.

The software is designed to let IT administrators get ahead of any problems – including power outages and traffic bottlenecks – before they arise. The software issues automatic alerts when it detects a problem and creates a dashboard to help analyse and correct the problem, according to IBM. It can also automatically correct some issues that arise.

The Tivoli Live Monitoring Services can monitor up to 500 resources, and includes around-the-clock phone and email support.

Zollar said the Tivoli data centre monitoring software is the first product from the Tivoli unit that is being offered through the IBM cloud, which the company announced in June.

IBM will be aggressively pushing more Tivoli services onto the cloud over the next year, he said.