Introduction

Organizations accelerated their digital transformation journey in the last few years, as customers expected 24/7 online access to shopping, banking, healthcare, and more such applications. With an expected baseline set by customers, business success now depends on fast, user-friendly applications, as slow performance and downtime drives users to competitive products and services. Ensuring high availability and responsiveness, while meeting strict performance SLOs can be achieved through observability.

Application Modernization

Users of these applications also want to see constant improvements in the features, while enhancing the user experience on a regular basis. Businesses must be responsive to their user requirements and continuously innovate to deliver new features and improve functionality very quickly. To achieve this, they are modernizing their monolithic backend applications into modular, microservice based containerized applications, that supports continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), i.e. upgrading applications on a weekly or even daily basis. This requires automation in their CI/CD pipelines, including quality assurance, and continuous monitoring of production deployments using an efficient observability tool.

Need for Observability

Traditional monitoring tools compartmentalize different layers of the IT environment – infrastructure, platform, application, database, etc.- and treat them as separate islands that are monitored by separate groups. When a problem arises, each group has their own perspective of the problem, and resolution can take a long time as coordination becomes difficult. Modern applications call for speed and agility, as issues need to be identified, prioritized, and resolved almost immediately to keep customer satisfaction levels high.

Observability tools differ from traditional monitoring by focusing on application and end user experience. These observability tools can automatically detect incidents happening within an application, like slow response times, and diagnose the probable root cause for the problem in any layer of the application stack. This reduces the diagnosis time, i.e. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and using AI and automation can also help to resolve the incidents faster, thereby reducing Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).

IBM Tivoli and IBM Instana

IBM’s Tivoli family of monitoring products has successfully served different types of clients for the past two decades to monitor their core infrastructure, platforms, and monolithic applications. With a focus toward application modernization, the Tivoli clients are looking to keep up with the latest technologies like Kubernetes, NoSQL databases and monitor applications written in modern programming languages like node.js, Golang, etc. IBM’s recommended solution to these clients is IBM Instana Observability, which is an observability tool that has been designed from ground up to support these modern technologies and at the same time, allow a hybrid environment to include traditional backend applications. Instana supports more than 350 technologies, with a modern UI that offers a friendly user experience and has a SaaS offering that lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) by removing the management overhead. IBM clients using Tivoli products IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) can switch to Instana and reap the benefits of this next generation observability product.

As Instana is a modern observability product, the end user experience for its users can be different from those who have traditionally used ITM/ITCAM. Instana detects issues holistically and can offer probable root causes automatically by analyzing contextual metrics, traces, and logs from the entire application and infrastructure stack that is associated with the issue. It gathers relevant, high value metrics instead of obtaining all the data that will be seldom used. Hence, when making a comparison between Instana and ITM/ITCAM, it should not be done feature-by-feature but instead based on how Instana can solve a use case in a much efficient way.

Tools for Modernization

IBM has simplified the path to modernization using a phased approach with the following offerings and is working with its clients to educate them with these steps and help plan the migration journey in a collaborative and seamless way.

1. Auto-entitlement of Instana license

Standalone ITM & ITCAM clients are now entitled to use Instana Essentials Self-Hosted as these part numbers are now bundled in the Instana product. These ITM & ITCAM part numbers have now reached End of Marketing (EOM) as per the IBM announcement published in October 2024. This auto-entitlement can eliminate the overhead of procurement process that will delay the modernization.

2. Co-existence

The auto-entitlement of Instana, also allows existing Tivoli clients to have both the products in place at the same time and take a phased approach to migrate to Instana. This can be done in the following ways:

1. Operate ITM and Instana separately. Both products can be installed and operated in different areas of the business. For example, the test environment can be migrated first and then the production, or a less critical application can be migrated before more critical ones. As the client becomes more comfortable operating Instana, more entities from ITM can be migrated from Instana.
2. Send data from ITM agents to Instana. Certain ITM agents like operating system, Database agents, etc. can send data to Instana backend through Instana Integration Service. This allows clients to view modern workloads along with traditional monitoring with a single Instana tool. Tivoli Log File Agent (LFA) events can also be forwarded, and alerts can be raised through Instana. This allows ITM clients to preserve their investment in configurations to LFA and custom agents and bring their data into the Instana environment for richer analysis.

3. Transition Tools

IBM Technology Expert Labs has collaborated with the Instana team to develop migration tools to help transition the configuration data from ITM to Instana. This tool helps with the following features where the ITM users have customized the tool to their requirements and want to use similar functionality in Instana.

1. ITM situations to Instana events.
2. Users' profiles in ITM.

4. Expert Labs Services

IBM Expert Labs can help with the modernization effort by working with the client to analyze the current environment, create a detailed plan, and execute the migration process. The Expert lab team provides various packages that can be purchased based on the client’s experience with observability and available resources. By leveraging the Expert Labs, a client can accelerate their modernization project in an optimum way as the migration can be done quickly and efficiently with the vast experience and knowledge of the Expert Labs team.

5. IBM documentation and Project Office

If the client wants to perform the modernization themselves, IBM provides documentation materials for the analysis, plan, and execution steps. There is a dedicated project office staffed by both ITM and Instana experts to answer questions and guide the clients in their migration. This project office can be reached through email at, ibm-tivoli-monitoring-modernization@wwpdl.vnet.ibm.com and help can be sought for:

• License conversion and mapping questions. The office can evaluate the current ITM/ITCAM licenses and advise how they will be mapped to Instana licenses.
• Trade-up from Instana Essentials to Instana Standard edition for advanced observability capabilities. (Announcement)
• Evaluate client use cases and advise how Instana can solve them. If there is any gap in Instana the project office will take this feedback and provide a roadmap on when Instana will deliver on this gap.
• Offer best practices for modernization with experience and knowledge from previous modernization journeys.

Conclusion

ITM and ITCAM users can now leverage the power of a modern observability tool in Instana. IBM provides an easy path for this modernization to help its clients with this upgrade. This includes auto-entitlement, experts from a dedicated project office, services offerings, tools, documentation and migration advice. Clients are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity to modernize their traditional monitoring as ITM/ITCAM products are in maintenance mode (bug fixes & security fixes only), and all new enhancements, including AI-infused features, are being continuously added to Instana.

Next steps

1. Read Gartner Peer Insights review of a client who migrated from Tivoli to Instana
2. Watch webinar

Keywords:

#instana #tivoli #ITM #ITCAM #observability #modernization

#Announcement