IBM's three new management tools aim to reduce arduous IT tasks through automated monitoring and self-healing of systems and apps.IBM Corp. will reach another milestone in its autonomic computing drive on Friday when it makes three automated management offerings generally available.
The new Tivoli offerings that enable automated monitoring and self-healing of systems and applications are intended to help reduce the complexity of IT environments and reduce the amount of manual labor that has typically been required to manage IT environments.
The new offerings include IBM Tivoli Monitoring version 6.1, which brings new capabilities to define certain situations that are encountered and then define the actions that users want the software to take to automatically correct the issues.
"Autonomic computing is the migration of knowledge into the system. It allows system administrators to take the things they do that are labor-intensive and encode them in a way that the system can do them for the administrator," said Ric Telford, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM in Research Triangle Park, NC.
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With the situation editor, users can graphically define events such as "if you see this server has failed or it is running low on memory, trap these as they are happening and have the system correct it if thats what you want," he explained.
ITM 6.1 also adds a new user interface that allows users to view status information about different parts of systems being monitored.
IBM also added the new TCAM (Tivoli Composite Application Manager), which combines technology from acquired Candle Corp. and Cyanea to monitor and manage applications at the application rather than the resource level.
TCAM allows users to view all the layers of data associated with a particular application end-to-end, including the message layer between components in a service-oriented application, at the transaction layer and at the resource layer.
It also allows Web services messages to be monitored as they flow between components of the application.
If TCAM detects a problem such as transactions backing up in a queue, it can initiate actions for the system to take to heal itself. TCAM uses a web services interface in each element of a composite application to monitor and measure how long a SOAP message takes to process and how many are waiting to be processed on a particular service.
TCAM, which shares a common GUI with ITM 6.1, includes versions for services-oriented architecture environments, WebSphere and for response time tracking. All are available on Friday.
With the third new autonomic computing offering, IBM extended the mainframe-based ability to script recovery operations in the event of a failure to distributed environments.
The new Tivoli System Automation for multiplatforms allows users to set up through scripts automation policies for AIX, Linux and Windows platforms.
For example, if a database fails, it may need to be re-synchronized with an application server once it is available again. Such actions can be defined in policies that automatically execute the series of steps required to do that.
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