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IBM recently launched its Alert Notification Service, a new service on IBM Cloud that enables DevOps teams to rapidly receive and respond to alerts about potential issues with their applications, before their users are affected.
Available in beta on the company’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS), the IBM Alert Notification Service works with the real-time and historical network analytics of IBM Netcool Operations Insight. By forming a single, coherent view across networks and operations, this new service enables developers and operators to receive notifications when their attention is required. The notifications can be received via email, Short Message Service (SMS) or voice.
Developers can use the REST API to integrate with this service to notify the right team. To help protect against downtime, the service can be configured for escalations to diminish the time needed to identify and respond to an alert.
Moreover, to ensure teams never miss any actionable, crucial alerts, IBM Alert Notification Service is designed to allow teams to create customized notification policies, ensuring alerts are routed immediately to the right team members. Further raising the visibility of alerts, this service also enables users to opt to receive alerts via text or voicemail, in addition to email. The IBM Alert Notification Service also works with on-premise solutions for enterprises that want to deploy it across hybrid environments.
“Because IBM Alert Notification is provided as a service, the required server infrastructure is installed and managed by IBM, reducing your time-to-value and offering low-maintenance ownership,” Dev Ambasna, business programs and social lead for IT Ops at IBM, wrote in a blog post.
IBM launched Bluemix with a $1 billion investment in 2014, and the Bluemix catalog now includes more than 120 tools and services spanning categories of big data, mobile, Watson, analytics, integration, DevOps, security and the Internet of things (IoT).
IBM has been busy adding to its portfolio of Bluemix services. Earlier this month, the company announced IBM Object Storage, an IBM Cloud service that enables developers to interactively compose and connect object storage into their apps.
This service, which comes as a follow-on of IBM’s recent acquisition of Cleversafe, provides app developers with a scalable, API-accessible platform to store and retrieve unstructured data, as well as build apps around this content. Available in beta on Bluemix, Object Storage also enables developers to access this valuable data from external apps.
IBM Object Storage is designed to make it faster, easier and more secure for developers to tap into and store growing volumes of unstructured data, including content such as images, documents and videos. It’s estimated that out of the 2.5 billion gigabytes of data that are created every day, 80 percent is unstructured content.
As the volume of the world’s digital images, photos, sound files and more grows, so does the value of this unstructured data to developers building intelligent, useful and creative apps. But this bulky and hard-to-understand data not only presents a challenge to store efficiently, but to do so in a way in which app creators can easily tap into it and seamlessly build apps around the valuable intelligence unstructured data offers.
IBM Object Storage, easily accessible on IBM Cloud, enables developers to compose and connect object-based storage into their apps—using a single API to retrieve it rapidly and securely from apps both inside and outside Bluemix, IBM said. This enables developers to build and scale their apps around this content, and in turn, create new ways to tap into its value.
In November, IBM announced a new cloud-based service that enables developers to automatically translate cloud and mobile apps into nine different languages.
The new service, IBM Globalization Pipeline, is now available in beta on IBM’s Bluemix PaaS. Big Blue said the Globalization Pipeline will help open up new global markets to companies without requiring them to rebuild or redeploy their applications.
The beta version will support English as the base language as well as nine additional languages: French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.
“Globalization Pipeline accommodates both the enterprise application team that may already be translating but want to adapt their processes to their new cloud development environment, and app developers new to translation who want to get started without a large investment in understanding translation processes, securing vendors or implementing new tools,” Lisa McCabe, IBM’s program director for Global Foundations Technology, wrote in a blog post.
Also last month, IBM released a new cloud tool that eliminates the need for users to share personal information with apps.
Big Blue’s new Identity Mixer is a tool to protect a consumer’s personally identifiable information. This technology also is accessible to developers on Bluemix.
IBM officials said Identity Mixer is based on years of cryptography research, and is key to helping to reduce identity theft that results from sharing personal data on mobile and Web apps. Using algorithms, the tool enables developers to build apps that can authenticate users’ identities without collecting personal data, otherwise known as a “zero-knowledge proof.”