IBM Debuts Cloud-Based Datacenter Monitoring Tools

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IBM this week rolled out a new cloud-based datacenter management suite that it says will give IT administrators a central point of control to monitor network activity and help prevent outages that can bring enterprise datacenters to a screeching halt.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services is now available in a subscription model from IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) cloud. It offers “enterprise-class” monitoring capabilities as a service, giving business customers a snapshot view of all their disparate operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and software and software applications.

“With digital information as the lifeblood of more organizations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the datacenter’s functionality mission-critical,” Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli, said in a statement.

“With this new service, IBM is delivering our smartest datacenter software in which businesses choose and pay for what they need,” he added.

IBM officials said the service helps to quickly identify and address potential outages and bottlenecks that threaten application availability before impacting end-users. When the service detects a potential problem, it automatically alerts IT operations and displays the relevant information in a dashboard to help analyze and correct the issue.

The Tivoli Live Monitoring Services application also can be programmed to automate certain tasks that enable the affected system to fix itself when faced with certain issues.

Customers can access preconfigured and dedicated instances of IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.1, IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications 6.2 and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Applications 6.2. The service will support the monitoring of up to 500 monitored resources such as operating systems, applications and devices.

It also features round-the-clock phone and e-mail support. IBM said additional services will be available through IBM Business Partners.

IBM officials said Tivoli Live Monitoring Services will be priced either per service or monitored element on a monthly basis and requires a minimum commitment of at least 90 days.

While Big Blue was late to joining the Software-as-a-Service race — launching as most of the other leading software vendors were already finding ways to adopt the model — it’s making up for lost time. Last month, IBM launched another SaaS product, Blue Insight, that lets users analyze and distribute more than a petabyte of business intelligence and analytics applications from the cloud.

And little wonder: Gartner predicts the worldwide SaaS market will surge to more than $19.3 billion by 2011.