IBM has launched a new offering designed to help companies more efficiently manage applications and services across a hybrid cloud environment by gaining real-time visual insights on the performance of supporting infrastructure.

Agile Service Manager for IBM Netcool Operations Insight will help companies in industries rapidly moving applications to the cloud — such as telecommunications and financial services — better monitor changes in their underlying systems so they can avoid customer service disruption. It's among the only offerings in the IT industry to provide a detailed topology of infrastructure across a broad set of domains, including different public clouds and on-premises systems, with both real-time updates and historical views.

By having this view of virtual and physical resources, companies can now better manage applications and services deployed across highly distributed and increasingly complex hybrid cloud networks. Agile Service Manager also can help companies prevent and more quickly resolve problems by providing context about the resources that underpin a hybrid cloud network. This is especially important for companies where applications put significant demands on network resources while requiring continuous uptime to meet customer expectations.

For example, a communications service provider could use IBM Netcool Operations Insight with Agile Service Manager to support launching and scaling a new, cloud-based video conferencing service. As the company expands use of the conferencing service, Agile Service Manager could provide real-time insights about the infrastructure supporting the new service, such as response time of specific servers and capacity of storage, letting the company know if these assets are meeting customer needs.

"In today's fast-changing marketplace, companies are under increasing pressure to roll out new and enhanced applications for customers," said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Hybrid Cloud. "Agile Service Manager gives valuable new insights about what is going on in the network and how it is impacting service quality and customers in real time."

Companies can use Agile Service Manager to present a configurable topology view that shows the relationships and states of resources both in real time and within a defined time window. Agile Service Manager extends the capabilities of IBM Netcool Operations Insight, an analytics driven software that helps organizations gain actionable insights from the massive amounts of operational data generated from their hybrid cloud environments.