What Is IBM Turbonomic?
IBM Turbonomic is an application resource management solution that optimizes IT workloads automatically. It ensures applications receive necessary resources by analyzing resource utilization across the entire stack, including application, compute, storage, and network layers.
Turbonomic operates by continuously monitoring and analyzing real-time data. It automates optimization processes without manual intervention, ensuring constant alignment between demand and resources. This aids organizations in maintaining service levels and improving capacity planning.
Key Features of Turbonomic
IBM Turbonomic offers several key features to optimize IT infrastructure performance while controlling costs:
- Continuous resource optimization: Turbonomic automatically adjusts compute, storage, and network resources in real-time to ensure optimal application performance. It continuously analyzes data across different layers of the infrastructure and executes optimization actions without the need for human intervention.
- AI-powered insights: The platform leverages artificial intelligence to deliver actionable insights, helping organizations make informed decisions. These AI-driven recommendations enable better resource allocation and optimization opportunities.
- What-if planning scenarios: Turbonomic allows teams to simulate different scenarios for capacity planning, enabling businesses to predict resource needs for future workloads or cloud migrations. This helps prevent over-provisioning and supports cost-effective scaling.
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support: The platform supports optimization for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware. This broad compatibility ensures that businesses can optimize across different cloud providers.
- Automation and trust across teams: Turbonomic fosters collaboration between engineering, operations, and application teams by providing trusted automation that is transparent and effective. This reduces friction across siloed teams.
Related content: Read our guide to IT mapping
How IBM Turbonomic Works
IBM Turbonomic ensures optimal application performance by continuously managing and balancing resources in real-time. It supports application resource management (ARM), which focuses on meeting application demands while maintaining efficient use of IT infrastructure. This involves monitoring various resources like compute, storage, and network, and automating the adjustments needed to keep the system in an appropriate state.
To achieve this, Turbonomic models the IT environment as a marketplace of buyers and sellers. In this marketplace, applications (the buyers) seek resources like memory and CPU (offered by the sellers). The platform uses a virtual currency to assign costs to these resources, allowing it to assess and optimize resource usage across different tiers of the environment — from physical datacenters to virtualized and cloud-based systems.
As resource demands change, prices fluctuate based on supply and demand. Turbonomic’s economic scheduling engine analyzes these price changes and makes decisions to dynamically adjust resources. For example, if an application needs more CPU, Turbonomic reallocates resources or provisions new instances. This closed-loop system allows the platform to automatically maintain the desired balance between resource efficiency and performance.
Instead of relying on static thresholds, Turbonomic operates proactively, using real-time data to recommend or execute actions that maintain the environment within its desired state. This state balances performance (measured by low delay) and resource utilization (measured by efficiency).
IBM Turbonomic Pricing
IBM Turbonomic offers several pricing tiers tailored to different business needs:
- Trial: This plan is free for 30 days and does not require a credit card. It provides unlimited optimization of application resources and cloud costs for AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts.
- Essentials: Priced at $40,000 USD per year, the Essentials package is suitable for startups and growing businesses. This plan supports public cloud optimization, Kubernetes optimization, and application and database resource optimization, with a focus on environments that spend less than $2 million USD annually on cloud resources.
- Standard: Aimed at enterprises, the Standard plan is priced per monitored cost. It offers broader functionality, including optimization across hybrid cloud environments and enterprise-level features like SLO-driven optimization and on-premises data center optimization. This plan is suitable for organizations with more than $2 million USD in annual cloud spend or those managing 200 or more virtual servers.
IBM Turbonomic Limitations
While IBM Turbonomic provides optimization tools, it’s important to be aware of its limitations. Users have reported the following issues on the G2 platform:
- Limited third-party integrations: Despite supporting a broad range of platforms, some users have noted gaps in integrations with specific third-party tools and services.
- Customization requirements for large organizations: Out-of-the-box functionality may not fully meet the needs of larger enterprises. Significant customization is often required to tailor the platform to specific requirements, adding to setup complexity.
- Scheduling complexity: The platform’s scheduling feature for tasks like application and server initiation can be rigid. Users must select from predefined schedules, limiting flexibility for custom setups. Additionally, there is a learning curve in configuring these schedules.
- Limited cloud service coverage: Turbonomic’s optimization capabilities are primarily focused on virtual machine (VM) stacks, which can leave organizations seeking better support for other cloud services.
- Cost concerns: IBM Turbonomic is often regarded as more expensive than alternatives. Its wide array of features might not be necessary for all users.
- Storage forecasting limitations: Some users expected more advanced storage forecasting features, but found the current tools insufficient for precise predictions.
IBM Turbonomic Alternatives and Competitors
1. Faddom
Faddom offers agentless application dependency mapping to provide real-time insights across hybrid IT environments. It ensures quick deployment and continuous visibility, helping businesses easily manage complexity.
- Agentless deployment: Installs in under 60 minutes without security risks or agents.
- Real-time mapping: Continuously tracks dependencies across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
- Automatic documentation: Generates up-to-date reports for compliance, audits, and IT governance.
- Anomaly detection: Identifies unexpected connections and security risks.
- Transparent pricing: One license covers all features with a per-server model, ensuring scalability and value.
Learn more about Faddom by downloading our latest comparative analysis on application discovery and dependency mapping, or start a free trial using the column on the right!
2. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a platform to optimize IT service management (ITSM), integrating multiple aspects of enterprise service management into a cohesive system. It focuses on automating IT operations to improve efficiency and productivity.
- Automated incident management: ServiceNow accelerates response times by automating incident resolution.
- Change and release management: Offers tools for planning, executing, and tracking IT infrastructure changes with minimal operational risk.
- Asset and configuration management: Maintains a comprehensive inventory of IT assets and configurations.
- Performance analytics: Provides analytics tools to track performance, identify trends, and drive continuous service improvement through data-driven insights.
- Self-service portal: Enables users to request services, report issues, and track incident statuses on their own.
Learn more in our detailed guide to ServiceNow service mapping
Source: ServiceNow
3. AppDynamics
AppDynamics is an application performance management (APM) and IT operations analytics platform that monitors and optimizes complex software environments in real-time. It enables organizations to align technology decisions with business outcomes by correlating performance metrics with operational efficiency.
- Business performance monitoring: Ties application performance to business metrics, helping teams prioritize actions that impact revenue or key business goals.
- End-to-end user monitoring: Tracks user experiences across applications, highlighting issues that affect customer satisfaction.
- Application diagnostics: Pinpoints root causes of application issues down to the code level in real-time, enabling swift resolution.
- Infrastructure visibility: Provides insights into servers, databases, and cloud environments supporting applications to ensure optimal performance.
- Network performance monitoring: Identifies network and third-party service issues affecting application performance.
Source: AppDynamics
4. LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that delivers visibility into network, server, and cloud environments. Its agentless architecture simplifies the monitoring of complex and dynamic infrastructures while providing real-time and predictive analytics.
- Infrastructure monitoring: Offers ready-to-use monitoring capabilities across networks, servers, virtual machines, storage, and cloud services, with support for over 2,000 integrations.
- Agentless monitoring: Minimizes deployment complexity by using agentless collectors to gather data from IT infrastructure.
- AI-driven alerts: Uses AI to set dynamic thresholds and intelligently filter alerts, reducing noise and focusing on critical issues.
- Topology mapping: Automatically generates visual maps of infrastructure dependencies, aiding in root cause identification during troubleshooting.
- Predictive analytics: Delivers insights on resource utilization trends to anticipate bottlenecks and capacity issues before they impact operations.
Source: LogicMonitor
5. Dynatrace
Dynatrace provides an AI-driven monitoring and observability platform for hybrid and cloud environments. It automates the discovery and visualization of dynamic infrastructures and delivers insights to enhance IT operations and efficiency.
- AI-driven insights: Leverages an AI engine to provide proactive insights, increasing team efficiency, reducing outages, and improving recovery times.
- Automated data contextualization: Automatically contextualizes data across the IT stack for in-depth analytics and AI-driven root cause analysis without manual intervention.
- Kubernetes observability: Offers features for Kubernetes environments, including health monitoring, resource analysis, and microservice dependency mapping with full-stack automation.
- Automation integration: Connects with automation tools for auto-remediation, real-time CMDB updates, and automated incident management.
- Log monitoring with Grail: Its log monitoring is powered by Grail, delivering high-context data analysis at reduced costs.
Source: Dynatrace
Learn more in our detailed guide to Turbonomic Competitors
Conclusion
IBM Turbonomic is a solution for optimizing application performance and managing IT resources efficiently across complex infrastructures. Its continuous real-time analysis and automation capabilities make it an effective tool for maintaining a balance between resource allocation and performance.
However, organizations should consider customization requirements and integration limitations before full implementation. A lightweight, agentless approach can deliver faster results with fewer security concerns, making it ideal for businesses that prioritize scalability, simplicity, and performance without added complexity.
