Johannesburg, 19 Nov 2021
In an increasingly complex environment, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are the only way for IT Operations teams to ensure optimal performance of the applications their organisations depend on.
This emerged during a virtual event on AIOps hosted by IBM, in partnership with ITWeb.
Donavan Marais, Architect for Hybrid Cloud Integration and MultiCloud Management at IBM, noted that businesses depend on applications to drive revenue, and that they therefore have to perform optimally. However, ensuring they do so is becoming more challenging. “With the move to cloud, modernised workloads, the use of multiple tools, and the application release cadence increasing, the environment has become increasingly complex.”
Andrew Hewitt-Coleman, Automation Sales Leader – FSS at IBM Southern Africa, added: “In addition, over time we have seen growing pressure on budgets, with a need to do more with less. Being able to assure application performance and stop over provisioning for applications enables organisations to do more with less and allocate budget for other important projects.”
Anders Landström, EMEA Integration Executive for Turbonomic at IBM, said: “Cost saving is a side effect of being effective. In today’s environment, you cannot effectively manage application performance manually. Even in smaller environments, there will be lots of complexity with lots of components spread across environments.”
The experts outlined how Watson AI, Turbonomic and Instana solutions can revolutionise IT Operations and intelligently manage application performance.
Instana automates full stack visibility across all environments, detecting hidden issues with real time granularity and complete and accurate data fidelity. “It doesn’t just tell you when something is wrong, but also why it is wrong,” Marais said.
He explained that Turbonomic Application Resource Management continuously analyses applications' resource utilisation and launches automated actions to ensure applications get what they need to perform, while adhering to business policies.
“It takes the guesswork out of resource allocation, to control cloud spend and eliminate wasted expenditure by a minimum of 30%,” Marais said.
IBM Watson AIOps integrates all structured and unstructured data and events for simplified management, analysis and root cause identification.
Turbonomic can help AI Operations reduce cloud spend by at least 30% and reduce cloud waste by 100%, increase availability of business-critical applications by 20% and support innovation by increasing speed to market by 40%, Marais said.
Landström noted: “Tools like Turbonomic can be implemented quite fast, and deliver value quickly. For example, Shoprite implemented Turbonomic and after a day they saw a 35% efficiency gain and after a week, an 85% improvement in response time.”
Jake Chinery, Enterprise Account Director at Turbonomic, said: “Time to value is very fast – in some cases, customers will start seeing value within 20 minutes. If you get performance right – allocating the right amount of resources, you don’t have to worry about provision anymore. Turbonomic gives a balance of cost and performance. Some of our large bank customers are saving up to $72 million a year by optimising performance.”
He noted that Turbonomic is not an application performance monitoring tool, but instead pulls data such as response times, making the necessary changes in the environment that the application monitoring (APM) tool cannot.
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