IBM offers Tivoli Monitoring for Amazon cloud deployments

IDG News Service - Companies running applications on Amazon Web Services can now monitor their environments using IBM’s Tivoli Monitoring software.

"We're now providing enterprise-class resource monitoring for products that are launched on the Amazon cloud," said Dave Mitchell, director of strategy and emerging business for IBM.

IBM already offered several other products on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), including DB2, WebSphere Portal and IBM Mashup Center. On Monday, it said customers can also fire up Tivoli Monitoring as an Amazon Machine Image.

Users can monitor systems, applications and databases, Mitchell said. Like most resources accessible in the cloud, users will pay for Tivoli Monitoring based on time and how much of the resource they use.

There are three pricing tiers based on the number of virtual cores being monitored, ranging from 50 cores on the low end to 600 on the top end. Users pay to access the monitoring software by the hour, depending on which tier the application they're monitoring falls into.

Companies can start using Tivoli Monitoring by searching for a Tivoli AMI in their AWS console, Amazon said. IBM is offering scripts for data collection agents and help guides, Amazon said.

IBM is likely to add more of its products to the Amazon cloud over time, Mitchell said. "Moving forward we'll be driven by what our partners and customers want us to put there," he said.

Offering its software on the Amazon cloud is part of IBM's strategy to deliver its products in any way that customers want them. "It's an exciting opportunity for us to provide tools to companies of all sizes to administer and manage and monitor these hybrid environments," Mitchell said. He is seeing a trend toward a hybrid approach, where companies use hosted clouds for certain functions while maintaining internal environments for other software and services.