IBM (News - Alert) has announced new capabilities for its event management software designed to enable customers to predict potential events such as network outages, online trading transaction failures, cell phone service disruptions or retail point-of-sale downtime.

The IBM Tivoli offers new “predictive analytics” that take event management to the next level through trending and historical data to help customers be proactive instead of reactive when managing millions of potential events per day.

These predictive capabilities are now available in recently released versions of IBM Tivoli Monitoring, IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and IBM Tivoli Network Manager. The new version of Tivoli Business Service Manager – available later this fall – will also feature these new capabilities.

Event Management products are designed to provide IT personnel with the necessary tools to deal with the massive amount of events that come in from the IT infrastructure through the elimination of duplicate event signals, filtering events according to operational or business priorities and analyzing events to determine root cause.

These goals are in place to reduce the time it takes to isolate and repair problems as well as to prioritize IP support efforts. Such an approach helps to create a more efficient environment, while also controlling overall costs.

Predictive analytics delivers a capability within the broader event management space that seeks to identify baselines and trends that are developing before a failure or degradation in service quality occurs. Such things as a slow performing server, constrained memory or thrashing disk operations can impact the customer – creating a poor experience.  

A major advancement for IBM Tivoli software, the new predictive analytics capabilities expand IBM’s service availability and performance management portfolio of products. With this software, customers can now perform adaptive baselining which allows dynamic thresholding and predictive alerting.  

The software establishes the baseline in the operation. Once this baseline is determined, Tivoli can also enable customers to set dynamic thresholds which allow customers to extract the business maximum tolerance from their infrastructure.

By determining baseline operations and behaviors, the software allows for predictive alerting that helps to identify trends and predict when a failure may occur. It can then generate an alarm to notify staff that they need to take proactive action before a customer impact occurs.

“The new predictive analytics capabilities bring significant advancement to the IBM Tivoli software portfolio,” said Al Zollar, general manager of Tivoli Software, IBM.

“With the software, we are elevating business and IT event management from reactive to proactive with a scalability that supports the world’s leading service provider and enterprise operations,” added Zollar.

The proactive approach that appears to be inherent in Tivoli helps to deliver what IT managers have been wanting all along – a solution designed specifically to make their jobs easier. This solution also allows for activities that are necessary for the health of the system, but seamless to the customer. This method helps to create a better experience for the customer and more efficiency overall.