IBM updates its Turbonomic Application Resource Management and Instana Observability software to help organizations manage application performance and energy and costs to accelerate sustainability initiative progress

In a constantly evolving business environment, many organizations are struggling to deliver on elevated customer expectations while navigating the challenges of skilled labor gaps, digital disruption, and increasingly complex IT environments.

With more people leaving the workforce, companies lack the staffing required to manage these environments and scale them by traditional means. To bridge this gap, organizations are turning to new digital solutions like automation technology to better leverage their existing talent.

Indeed, the IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, which was commissioned by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, found that 30% of global IT professionals surveyed stated they have already implemented AI and automation software, helping their employees save time. For example, organizations including BBC Studios and ExaVault are leveraging solutions like AIOps and observability to more deeply understand the data around their IT operations.

To further help organizations proactively manage their IT resources in a cost-effective manner, we are announcing important updates to two of our key offerings: IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management and IBM Instana Observability. These software offerings are part of IBM's end-to-end portfolio of intelligent automation solutions for business and IT, with many of the solutions developed by IBM Research.

IBM Turbonomic Increases Visibility into Sustainability of IT Resources

As COP27 comes to a close this week, organizations are looking with renewed focus at using technology to align sustainability goals with business objectives – an area where IBM has been investing across our broader portfolio. As part of this focus, IBM is announcing new capabilities to help CIOs and IT teams take a more active role in helping their organizations operationalize sustainability.

The new updates to IBM Turbonomic software provide organizations with near real-time visibility of the direct energy and emissions impact of data center resources, to help them manage energy consumption. IBM Turbonomic takes a top-down approach to “stitch” together resources, such as memory, CPU and storage, so that applications only consume the resources needed.

The newly released IBM Turbonomic sustainable IT dashboard provides organizations with visibility into both energy consumption and the estimated emissions of data center operations. It also provides actionable insights on how IT decisions could potentially impact these factors, so different options can be benchmarked and prioritized through an environmental sustainability lens. With this operational-level data at their fingertips, IT professionals can make meaningful contributions to the organization’s sustainability targets, supporting environmentally sustainable business growth.

The new Turbonomic capabilities can further facilitate a companys sustainability initiatives by connecting and feeding data to the IBM Envizi ESG Suitegiving them insight  as to how their IT decisions intersect with their sustainability goals and reporting. Envizi automates the collection and consolidation of more than 500 data types and supports major sustainability reporting frameworks. These technologies are part of IBM’s broader sustainability portfolio, which is designed to help organizations take a data-driven approach to operationalize sustainability efforts across their business. 

In a  Forrester Total Economic Impact Study , Forrester illustrates how IBM Turbonomic can help cut cloud spend by 33%, reduce data center refresh costs by 75%, and provide the ability to get back 30% of engineering time with smarter resource management.*

Help Applications Run Optimally with IBM Instana Observability

Application errors can often cause more than headaches for IT; software problems can easily impact customer experience and ultimately, the business. Teams need a way to find the root cause of problems and quickly resolve them. That’s where observability can help, and it goes beyond just simply monitoring applications. Monitoring tells you when something is wrong, while observability can tell you what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how to fix it.

IBM Instana is a robust observability solution that helps organizations track IT performance and resolve incidents quickly. In the  Forrester Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by IBM, Forrester illustrates how IBM Instana can help an organization reduce mean time to resolution by 50% and can reduce time spent debugging applications by 75%.** IBM also is adding new capabilities around OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral standard of tools and APIs for collecting, accessing and transferring telemetry data, including outputs from logs, metrics and traces (ie: the “three pillars of observability”) to more deeply understand how applications are performing. With OpenTelemetry, DevOps professionals can make informed coding decisions and adjust as their organization continues to change and grow.

We are also extending IBM Instana’s capabilities around synthetic monitoring, which is essentially the ability to measure your users’ perceived application performance. Synthetic monitoring will help in indicating when there are network problems between the end user and backend services.

Organizations can now also use IBM Instana to monitor applications on SAP, Red Hat OpenShift, IBM System z, IBM Power, IBM MQ, IBM Db2 and more.

Organizations Globally Turn to IBM Software to Support Application Performance

Companies of all sizes across industries around the world are turning to IBM Instana and IBM Turbonomic to drive growth and cost savings in their digital transformations. Some prominent examples include, BBC Studios, Carhartt, ExaVault, J.B. Hunt, Rabobank, and Roma Capitale.

Major broadcaster BBC Studios is using IBM Turbonomic to simultaneously minimize cost and assure application performance of their on-premises environment of 1,000 virtual machines (VMs). The team began by manually running Turbonomic’s resizing recommendations, significantly reducing the number of end-user complaints and eliminating downtime in the process. Once they saw the results of manual resizing, the team automated scheduled resizing on a select set of mission-critical applications, proactively and holistically assuring application performance.

"Because we are able to rely on IBM Turbonomic’s intelligent automation to assure application performance 24x7, our team can now focus their efforts on pursuing strategic initiatives rather than fighting fires," said Porsche Waddell, Server and Storage Manager, BBC Studios.

ExaVault, an organization whose solutions facilitate two billion file transfers per year, is using IBM Instana to monitor API performance and for error tracking, debugging and alerting. The most important metric ExaVault looks at on a day-to-day basis is latency. “We need to make sure that every customer is having a good experience,” said Tom Fite, Senior Backend Engineer at ExaVault. “If a customer is waiting more than a couple seconds, they might leave.”

Since ExaVault started using Instana, the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for customer-impacting bugs has dropped by 56.6%. In addition, the platform’s slowdowns and downtime have decreased substantially. It was at 99.51% uptime before, and it’s now at 99.99%. “We’re accomplishing the goal that we set out to do,” said Fite. “The reason we were able to do that is we had better visibility into our problems.”

At IBM, we believe that organizations will increasingly turn to intelligent automation to address the industry-wide gaps in skilled labor, supply chain disruptions, increasing customer expectations and complex operating environments that are pressing on today’s ever-expanding IT and business landscapes.

* Forrester Total Economic Impact Study: The Total Economic ImpactTM Of IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management (commissioned by IBM) [https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JEWOV1BM]. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five customers with experience using IBM Turbonomic. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewed decision-makers and combined the results into a single composite organization.

** Forrester Total Economic Impact Study: The e Total Economic ImpactTM Of IBM Cloud Pak For Watson AIOps With Instana (commissioned by IBM)[ https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/09EDOML3]. In the study, Forrester created a composite organization based upon the experiences of four clients.  By automating incident response and increased visibility into application performance, the composite organization reduced the time required to perform investigation and response tasks by 50% and the time spent debugging organizations by 75%.