IBM showcases Gen AI-driven Concert to monitor and manage enterprise applications

IBM has showcased its new generative AI-driven Concert offering that is designed to help enterprises monitor and manage their applications.

Showcased at the ongoing annual Think conference, IBM Concert will be generally available in June and is underpinned by the watsonx platform. It will serve as the “nerve center” of an enterprise’s IT operation, the company said, adding that the offering will generate insights across an enterprise’s folio of applications to help reduce risk and compliance processes.

The new tool integrates into an enterprise’s existing systems using generative AI to connect with data from their cloud infrastructure, source repositories, CI/CD pipelines and other existing observability offerings to build out a 360-degree view of their connected applications, Bill Lobig, vice president of product management at IBM Automation said in a blog post.

This all-round view, which has been christened IBM Concert 360 view, contains a single unified view of an enterprise’s applications along with their dependencies, information about risks around applications, and a view of common flows between applications.

The Concert offering focuses on dependency mapping across an increasingly broad set of data sources (or entities) to enable developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and operations to better understand potential problems at the application layer, according to IDC Research Vice President Stephen Elliot. 

“As more IT executives need teams to find issues spanning security, code, and operational domains, the ability to understand dependencies across these vast data lakes is becoming mission critical,” Elliot explained.

Further, the research vice president said that IBM Concert can be compared with observability offerings from vendors, such as Dynatrace, Cisco AppD, Splunk Observability Platform, and New Relic. 

Amalgam Insight’s chief analyst Hyoun Park, on the other hand, thinks that IBM Concert superficially has traits that are common with IT asset management offerings. However, the chief analyst also pointed out that the level of governance provided by Concert makes it more akin to a control pane for maintaining an optimal usage, support, and compliance environment for every application. 

IBM claims that Concert will initially focus on helping enterprises with use cases around security risk management, application compliance management, and certificate management.

Additional risk use cases are planned to be introduced over time, as well as other focus areas like cost, observability, security, and networking among others, Lobig said. IBM has not clarified how an enterprise can subscribe to the offering and how to access it. However, it is providing a page to sign up for the offering as part of a waitlist program.