With December's release of IBM SmartCloud Monitoring, Tivoli's venerable IBM Tivoli Monitoring product family, proven in data centers at the world's largest corporations, begins to adopt a "Cloud" posture.  Sure, "Cloud" is a term bereft of a clear operational definition that we can apply at any given moment, and customers, analysts and vendors tend to bandy it about pretty freely these days.  However, if we don't get too hung up what Cloud is or isn't, we can probably agree that it represents a migration from our traditional server-delivered infrastructure to one comprised of pooled computing resources shared by virtual workloads. Whether or not our customers are calling their virtualized environments "private clouds" today, and whether or not they've got a "cloud budget" that they're using for such initiatives, the fact that they're moving along the cloud maturity continuum at some pace seems inescapable, given IDC's assertion that we crossed the magical "50%" boundary last year, when half of all corporate workloads were running on virtual machines instead of physical ones.

 

If we're beginning to think in terms of clouds of pooled computing resources, it makes sense that we begin to deliver management solutions in the same way, right?  If the server administrators, storage administrators and network administrators now report to a cloud administrator, we should begin to package solutions for those cloud administrators, combining multiple pieces of management technology into a single part number that customers can purchase and deploy. That's exactly what we've done with SmartCloud Monitoring.  The discrete monitoring agents that are at the heart of IBM Tivoli Monitoring; OS monitors, application monitors, storage, etc., are as important as they ever were.  Even though we're pooling those resources across virtual machines, we still have to monitor things like processes, CPU activity, IO throughput, and so on.  We just need to add a layer on top of all that granular detail, so the cloud administrator can see, at a glance, what's healthy or unhealthy about his cloud environment, before drilling down into the nuts and bolts.

 

SmartCloud monitoring combines the VMware virtualization management features in ITM for Virtual Environments with virtual machine instance monitoring from ITM's operating system agents, to monitor a cloud infrastructure and the workloads running on it.

Our roadmap looks like an analyst's cloud maturity ladder, adding features such as automated provisioning, usage and accounting integration, and more detailed network monitoring, so our solution will "mature" along with the market, and customers' needs.  See if the challenges along this ladder look like things that you or your customer have faced on their cloud journey, or are grappling with now.  It's important to note that Tivoli has solutions that can be applied to each step, and for each problem.  What SmartCloud promises is a way to bring those solutions together into more consumable bundles, tightly integrated together, to make cloud management simple to purchase and simple to deploy.

 

 SmartCloud Monitoring delivers key capabilities for optimizing and maintaining a private cloud, including:

• Health dashboards, to provide an instant, consolidated glimpse into cloud health
  
• Topology views of the key interrelated components of the cloud
• Reports on the health trends of cloud components and workloads, powered by Cognos
• What-If capacity planning scenariosPolicy-Based optimization to put workloads where they’ll perform best, not just where they’ll fit
• Performance Analytics for right-sizing of virtual machines
• Integration with industry-leading Tivoli service management portfolio