Enterprises moving toward hybrid and multi-cloud platforms will need full visibility of the myriad of applications running across this complex IT environment, so systems can be better optimized and critical services remain operational.
Applications can prove to be a management nightmare as organizations ramp up their software deployment to drive innovation, differentiate services, automate work processes, and extract data insights.
Worldwide spending on enterprise software is expected to clock the largest growth rate among all IT categories, increasing 11.7% in 2022 to hit US$669.11 billion, according to Gartner. The research firm predicts that spending in this technology segment will climb 13.2% this year to reach US$598.96 billion.
As more applications are rolled out, it can be challenging to monitor and manage their performance across complex IT environments as well as ensure the right resources are allocated to support critical tools and processes.
This can lead to significant issues. Service delivery will be impacted, resulting in poor customer and user experience, and IT departments may end up spending too much time troubleshooting when they should be focusing their attention on value-added activities.
Organizations need an observability platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), that will provide the contextual insights and automation businesses need to prevent outages and minimize system downtime.
Proactively Avoid Risks to Get Ahead of User and Business
This paper explains how IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps leverages AI to analyze data across environments and surface issues, with suggested resolutions in ChatOps to save you time, money and identify areas where automation can proactively improve your operations.
Download NowKnow when to allocate resources where needed
Talent acquisition platform PathMotion realized it needed full visibility and monitoring capabilities to keep up with its move to a microservices architecture, which runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Kubernetes Engine.
PathMotion turned to IBM's Instana for its enterprise observability platform, gaining the ability to automatically visualize and monitor the performance of its infrastructure and containerized applications.
The deployment helped PathMotion slash its virtual machines (VMs) by some 10% and redirect the freed up resources elsewhere where they were needed. When more capacity is needed, Instana triggers an alert indicating resources are strained. This prompts PathMotion to respond in a timely manner and procure new services in GCP to facilitate the spike in demand.
In addition, because it no longer needs to focus all its attention on maintaining its microservices infrastructure, PathMotion can spend more time improving its CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines.
Its software developers also can be allocated the tools they need to drive the development and rollout of patches and performance enhancements as well as the company's new service features.
With Instana, customers such as PathMotion can better identify underused resources, understand how their applications and processes interact, and optimize their work nodes.
Instana, which is part of the IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps offering, ingests all performance metrics, tracks all requests, and profiles every process. It delivers visibility to enable closed-loop DevOps automation and provides richer content that facilitates deeper intelligence and AI-powered problem resolution.
Instana reduces complexity with automated discovery and dependency mapping across hybrid cloud environments, spanning devices to mainframes. Capturing all transactions at one-second intervals, the platform collects billions of metrics daily in real-time, giving enterprises the analysis they need to keep operations running smoothly.
Optimize IT operational efficiencies with automation
These capabilities further complement those of Turbonomic, an application resource management (ARM) and network performance management platform that enables organizations to monitor the performance of their applications wherever they run and manage their availability across the enterprise.
Turbonomic ARM for IBM Cloud Paks helps enterprises match their IT resources, including containers, servers, storage, databases, and networks, to the applications that need them.
An IBM acquisition, Turbonomic also includes ParkMyCloud, a cost-optimization tool that helps companies manage their public cloud services more cost effectively and reduce their spending on development and test workloads.
Litehouse, for instance, faced challenges balancing its infrastructure cost and performance, as its IT environment evolved and expanded when new companies or plants were added to the fold.
It prompted the US food manufacturer to look at automation to more effectively manage its resources and assure performance.
It began leveraging Turbonomic to automate its VM placement and consolidate workloads. The IBM ARM platform enabled Litehouse to drive down its resource usage by right-sizing its VMs as well as reduce overprovisioning.
Instead of simply buying more memory to power new clusters for development, it now has spare VMs that can be easily powered down, removed from development, and deployed where they are needed.
Within the first week of deploying Turbonomic, Litehouse was able to identify 400 opportunities to enhance performance and optimize for efficiency.
Visualize the problem, so you can solve it automatically
Together, IBM's Instana and Turbonomic enable enterprises to automatically discover, map, and visualize their entire application and technology stack in real-time, so that every application gets the resources it needs to run smoothly, even as demand fluctuates.
The collective ability to establish this clear view of the relationships between resources and performance means, every action needed to enhance performance and optimize usage is not only application-aware, but also infrastructure-aware.
Wrapped under IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, Instana and Turbonomic provide observability, analytics, action, and predictive insights to prevent application performance issues, so organizations can significantly reduce operational risks and volatility.
When they run well, applications can power enterprises and support rich customer experience. Businesses need visibility at all times of new software they deploy and to determine whether every application has the appropriate resources it needs to run optimally.
Without this level of visibility, enterprises will not know what is happening in their own IT environment and how their systems can be continuously enhanced. They also will be unable to ensure customer-facing services are running properly and identify bottlenecks in their network.
Integrated with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, Instana and Turbonomic ensure organizations have the right ARM and other AI-powered capabilities they need to move from reaction to proactive IT operations management.
Read more about Instana + Turbonomics here
Estimate how intelligent automation and AIOps can boost your organization’s bottom line with this free benefits calculator.