Tivoli Live Monitoring Services: Customized Monitoring as an Online Service

What's the best way to monitor your IT infrastructure?

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. That is, what's the best way to detect emerging problems, take swift action to solve those problems (or even preclude them, if possible), and thus meet performance and availability targets for key services?

Different organizations will answer that question in different ways, but certainly the historical answer has been this: acquire, install, configure, and utilize dedicated monitoring tools. And for enterprise-class organizations with large and sophisticated infrastructures, that will likely continue to be the strategy of choice, since it provides high degree of flexibility and control.

For mid-market, growing organizations, though, the overall context is quite different. Their infrastructures will likely be less complex and diverse, and, as a consequence their IT staff tends to be smaller in headcount and usually challenged for resources. The realities of succeeding in the mid-market and high-growth segments typically translate to leaner organizations with less overhead.

That said, the essential challenge of ensuring application availability remains the same. Mid-market organizations still require a way to manage their infrastructures comprehensively and proactively—a way that fits their budgets and requires relatively little time and skills from the IT team.

Achieve enterprise-class monitoring capabilities through an affordable, online service

"Mid-market organizations still require a way to manage their infrastructures comprehensively and proactively—a way that fits their budgets and requires relatively little time and skills from the IT team." IBM's answer: IBM Tivoli Live Monitoring services. These new services capitalize on the emerging paradigm of software-as-a-service (SaaS) to deliver enterprise-class monitoring over the Internet. This approach gives midsized organizations an option to improve infrastructural availability, drive their service levels up, and generate more business value from the infrastructure, with lower up-front investments in an easy to use service

This version of Tivoli Live Monitoring Services is built on the existing IBM Tivoli Monitoring family product line, including:

IBM Tivoli Monitoring: The leading monitoring solution in the enterprise today, which proactively detects performance bottlenecks, declining resources, sudden spikes or changes in utilization, and other dynamic shifts, then notifies IT of the forthcoming problem in a variety of ways.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications: The Tivoli Monitoring value proposition applied specifically to Microsoft offerings. This tool contains in-depth information pertaining to Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, Exchange, and other Microsoft products, and can as a result drive up both their availability and their total business value.
IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Applications: A best-of-class tool to track the performance, from end to end, of even the most complex chain of composite applications resources and dependencies, allowing IT to rapidly isolate and eliminate bottlenecks and drive overall application performance up.

Via Tivoli Live, these software products are pre-configured, hosted and delivered over the Internet by IBM, available for immediate use by the client. When problems emerge in the client's infrastructure, the client’s IT department can quickly respond by isolating and treating the root cause of the problem through the data visualization and automation provided by Tivoli Live Monitoring Services. In effect, the IT department can take advantage of all of the benefits and capabilities that these software products provide, without having to procure hardware and install and configure the management infrastructure.

Since Tivoli Live Monitoring Services leverage IBM’s industry-leading management software, problems with application performance or availability can actually be anticipated and solved before they can create a negative business impact. This predictive capability is sure to be exceptionally attractive to organizations that increasingly leverage IT to fulfill core business goals, and whose tolerance for downtime has fallen in inverse proportion.

A granular, configurable solution that adapts to your needs

The fiscal argument for Tivoli Live Monitoring Services is similarly attractive—especially to organizations in the mid-market, whose budgets have been particularly squeezed by the gloomy economy of the last year.

IBM is offering Tivoli Live Monitoring Services as a configurable service, in which organizations can choose just the capabilities they want, paying for those specifically, and paying for them only so long as they need them. This approach makes it much easier to predict costs and also maximizes cost-flexibility down the road.

Consider that in addition to the current array of monitoring tools available, there are also different levels of monitoring service available for each:

Touchless monitoring: This offering is based on Tivoli’s agentless monitoring technology, called "touchless" because the client's IT infrastructure is not modified in order to collect data. It is the simplest level of monitoring, yet provides a relatively extensive range of monitoring capability when compared to what organizations may have in place at present.
Distributed monitoring: This service is based on Tivoli’s agent-based technologies, and delivers significantly more detailed information about the infrastructure's health levels and performance by relying on software agents. Once installed, these agents poll different systems, applications, and other assets, and report back over the Internet to the Tivoli monitoring infrastructure, a dedicated instance of which is assigned to the client. The agent-based service, in addition to providing higher visibility and robustness, also provides more functionality in the ability to automate a set of actions as a result of certain conditions being met, such as clearing up disk space when capacity is at a certain level, or recycling servers that may be hung or not responding.
Performance services: These include extensive reporting and business analytics that can demonstrate emerging trends, quantify the business consequences of different classes of problems, and inform future projections and budgets as a result. This might happen, for instance, by showing that a particular service tends to require more storage or processing power than was initially thought, and customer demand is going unmet.

This granularity delivers simple yet comprehensive monitoring capabilities for IBM clients. By addressing both the specific IT assets to be monitored (traditional IT assets, Microsoft assets, and composite applications) and the level of detail of monitoring (agentless, agent-based, and reporting/analytics), IBM is giving mid-market organizations a cost-conscious, flexible way to monitor exactly what they need to monitor, in exactly the ways they need.

Additionally, the fact that Tivoli Live takes advantage of the SaaS model implies many advantages for IBM clients. As updates to the monitoring tools become available, for instance, they will be applied automatically by IBM. This ensures that IBM clients will immediately reap the full business benefit from continually-current tools, without having to take any action or spend any money when updates are released.

The IBM data center at which the tools are hosted is rock-solid—a proven, reliable, high-performance foundation IBM clients can depend on for the highest possible availability. And the sheer technological scope of assets Tivoli Live will monitor is impressive: up to 500 client resources ranging from operating systems to applications to specific hardware devices.

Tivoli Live also boasts what might be called an impressive zero-to-sixty time. That is, clients can in most cases go from not having the service at all, to receiving the full business benefits of the fully-tailored service, in less than one business week. And over time, as their needs change, those clients can also simply change the terms of their Tivoli Live subscription on the fly.