WebSphere is one of IBMs most enduring offerings, providing many different editions spanning numerous versions over the last two decades. It is so ubiquitous in IBM offerings that many customers will find themselves running dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of instances across their infrastructure. How is one to keep track of all these instances and ensure they are up to date, efficiently utilized, and effectively charged?
IBM Cloud Product Insights provides an answer for WebSphere as well as an expanding list of additional IBM offerings. Product Insights provides a cloud-based dashboard showing a unified inventory of registered product instances, and allows administrators to view both current and historical usage metrics for single instances or defined clusters or collections.
First released in March 2017, the June update will bring several key improvements:
IBM Fix Central Integration: Automatically retrieve current version and fixpack information and provide insight into systems that may need updates. Did you know that WebSphere Application Server alone has had over 60 different numbered releases since v7.0? And that v9.0.0.4 of WebSphere Application Server was just released with over 140 fixes and enhancements? Add in WebSphere ND, Liberty, and others and there is a huge support library ready to serve your needs. Product Insights can help you find the right versions!
Credit: Alex Proimos
Support for Containerized WebSphere Instances: Hosting WebSphere on Kubernetes clusters allows dynamic scaling from a single server to a cluster of servers, and back down again, as needed by the workload. Product Insights can now handle these clusters as a single instance and give visibility into just how much capacity they provide over time.
Consumption Tracking: Monitor your consumption with downloadable reports. Product Insights can provide visibility into your past product usage, help you generate reports, and even point you in the right direction to get started with Bluemix and non-Bluemix services. WebSphere Application Server on Cloud may offer significant savings depending on your usage and workload patterns.
Remove instances that are no longer active: Did you evaluate Product Insights by registering an experimental product? Now you can get rid of it and other defunct product instances in the dashboard and focus on your current machines!
Credit: Dave Habben
Product Insights Gateway with Data Auditing: Data sent from on premise products to Product Insights can now be viewed, audited and approved to ensure confidential information is not being sent off premise. Additionally, the setup of the Product Insights Gateway to route data from protected systems has an enhanced administration interface to make setup and configuration easier.
Credit: Pixabay
Check Us Out
Whether you have five instances of WebSphere to manage or a thousand, whether you have just WebSphere Liberty or a mix of IIB, ODM, MQ, APIC, BPM, DP, WAS ND, and more (yes, IBM loves acronyms, how many can you identify?) check out the new capabilities in the June refresh of IBM Cloud Product Insights!
Join the Product Insights experts in an exclusive webinar on the 26th of July, to learn how to get started. Register here.
Additional information, videos, and recordings are also available in the IBM Marketplace!
This article originally appeared here and has been republished with the permission of the author.
About the author
Omkar Nimbalkar
Director Engineering,Products and IT
IBM Hybrid Cloud