Since 2001, when IBM Corp first started espousing the self-healing and autonomic computing technologies that are built into its various servers, systems software, and middleware, the company has been on a tear to develop yet more technologies to make systems better able to diagnose their own problems and fix them with as little human interaction as possible.
IBM is now claiming that there are more than 475 self-managing and autonomic features in 75 separate products.
IBM only brought those figures up to help peddle some new Tivoli products. The first, called Tivoli Monitoring 6.1, watches online applications such as email systems or Web-based transaction processing systems and look for hung states in the applications and catch them before they crash and restart them.
Tivoli Composite Application Manager is the second new tool, and it comes in three flavors–one for SOA-enabled software, one for the WebSphere stack, and one called Response Time Tracking that works with third party and homegrown applications. All three flavors share one thing in common: Composite Application Manager monitors the performance of applications and suggests what things system administrators need to do to improve the performance of applications.
Finally, Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms can monitor applications running across multiple physical servers and distinct operating systems and reboot those hybrid applications and their servers in the right order to restart the applications in the event of an outage.
