Many firms are trying to meet rising customer demands in a continually changing business environment while dealing with skilled labour shortages, digital disruption, and increasingly complicated IT environments.
In a statement, IBM said companies lack the resources to maintain and develop these environments through traditional means as more individuals leave the workforce. Organisations are turning to new digital solutions like automation technologies to bridge this gap and better employ their existing expertise.
According to the IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, commissioned by IBM in collaboration with Morning Consult, 30 per cent of global IT professionals questioned had already used AI and automation tools, allowing their employees to save time. For example, organisations such as BBC Studios and ExaVault are embracing solutions such as AIOps and observability to better understand the data around their IT operations.
To help enterprises manage their IT resources more proactively and cost-effectively, IBM introduces significant enhancements to two of its main offerings: IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management and IBM Instana Observability. These software offerings are part of IBM’s comprehensive range of intelligent automation solutions for business and IT, with many created by IBM Research.
IBM Turbonomic Increases Visibility into Sustainability of IT Resources
As COP27 concludes this week, enterprises are refocusing their efforts on using technology to integrate sustainability goals with business objectives — an area in which IBM has been investing across our whole portfolio. IBM is unveiling new tools to assist CIOs and IT teams in taking a more active role in assisting their enterprises in operationalising sustainability as part of this strategy.
The new IBM Turbonomic software improvements give enterprises near real-time visibility into the direct energy and emissions effect of data centre resources, allowing them to better control energy consumption. IBM Turbonomic is a top-down strategy to “stitch” together resources like memory, CPU, and storage so that applications only use what they require.
The newly announced IBM Turbonomic sustainable IT dashboard gives enterprises with visibility into both energy use and the predicted emissions of data centre operations. It also provides actionable insights into how IT decisions may impact these variables, allowing different options to be benchmarked and selected through an environmental sustainability lens. With this operational-level data at their fingertips, IT workers may significantly contribute to the organisation’s sustainability goals, promoting environmentally sustainable corporate success.
The new Turbonomic capabilities can help a company’s sustainability objectives by linking and feeding data to the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, providing insight into how IT decisions intersect with sustainability goals and reporting. Envizi automates the collection and consolidation of over 500 different data sources and is compatible with key sustainability reporting standards. These technologies are part of IBM’s broader sustainability portfolio, which is intended to assist enterprises in taking a data-driven approach to operationalising sustainability efforts across their organisation.
According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, IBM Turbonomic can help minimise cloud spending by 33 per cent, data centre renewal costs by 75 per cent, and enable the capacity to reclaim 30 per cent of engineering time through improved resource management.
Help Application Run Optimally with IBM Instana Observability
Application mistakes frequently create more than just IT difficulties; software issues can easily damage customer experience and the business. Teams require a method for finding the root cause of problems and resolving them. Observability comes in and extends beyond just monitoring applications. Monitoring alerts you when something is wrong, whereas observability tells you what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to remedy it.
IBM Instana is a robust observability solution that assists enterprises in tracking IT performance and promptly resolving incidents. Forrester illustrates how IBM Instana can help an organisation reduce mean time to resolution by 50 per cent and time spent debugging applications by 75 per cent in the Forrester Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by IBM. IBM is also adding new capabilities around OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral standard of tools and APIs for collecting, accessing, and transferring telemetry data, including outputs from logs, metrics, and traces (i.e., the “three pillars of observability DevOps experts can use OpenTelemetry to make informed code decisions and modify as their organisation changes and grows.
According to IBM, it is also expanding IBM Instana’s synthetic monitoring capabilities, essentially measuring your consumers’ perceived application performance. Synthetic monitoring will aid in detecting network issues between end users and backend services.
Organisations may now utilise IBM Instana to monitor SAP, Red Hat OpenShift, IBM System z, IBM Power, IBM MQ, IBM Db2, and other systems.
Organisations Globally Turn to IBM Software to Support Application Performance
IBM said globally, businesses of all sizes and industries are turning to IBM Instana and IBM Turbonomic to generate growth and cost savings in their digital transformations. BBC Studios, Carhartt, ExaVault, J.B. Hunt, Rabobank, and Roma Capitale are notable examples.
BBC Studios is utilising IBM Turbonomic to reduce costs while ensuring application performance in their on-premises environment of 1,000 virtual machines (VMs). The team started by manually running Turbonomic’s resizing recommendations, which reduced the number of end-user complaints and eliminated downtime. After seeing the outcomes of manual resizing, the team automated scheduled resizing on a limited set of mission-critical apps, ensuring application performance proactively and holistically.
“Because we are able to rely on IBM Turbonomic’s intelligent automation to assure application performance 24×7, our team can now focus their efforts on pursuing strategic initiatives rather than fighting fires,” said Porsche Waddell, Server and Storage Manager, BBC Studios.
ExaVault, whose products handle two billion file transfers yearly, uses IBM Instana to monitor API performance and error tracking, debugging, and alerting. Daily, the most essential parameter ExaVault considers is latency.
“We need to make sure that every customer is having a good experience,” said Tom Fite, Senior Backend Engineer at ExaVault. “If a customer is waiting more than a couple seconds, they might leave.”
Since implementing Instana, ExaVault’s mean time to resolution (MTTR) for customer-impacting bugs has decreased by 56.6 per cent. Furthermore, the platform’s slowdowns and downtime have been significantly reduced. It was previously at 99.51 per cent uptime and is now at 99.99 per cent.
“We’re accomplishing the goal that we set out to do,” said Fite. “The reason we were able to do that is we had better visibility into our problems.”
