IBM launches cloud AI service to manage complex networks

IBM is rolling out a new AI-powered cloud service designed to help companies get a better grip on their increasingly messy networks.

IT environments are becoming harder to manage, as networks comprise of a mix of on-premises data centres, private clouds, multiple public clouds, and SaaS apps. IBM’s new service, called Network Intelligence, tries to help that situation by giving companies a single point of reference to fix issues faster.

At its core, the service uses AI agents that can analyse data, figure out what might be causing problems, and suggest ways to fix them. The agents lean on pre-trained models that study network designs, telemetry, traffic flows, alarms, and time-series data to spot hidden issues and early signs of trouble. Once they’ve pieced everything together, they can propose likely causes and recommend actions to help teams respond.

The brains behind this system come from IBM’s watsonx technologies and the company’s Granite Time Series Foundation Models, a set of compact AI models developed by IBM Research. The models are tuned specifically for networking and trained on massive amounts of telemetry, alarms, and flow data from different types of environments.

IBM says this gives them a deeper understanding of how networks behave compared to rule-based systems, generic machine learning, or large language models. The result, the company says, is better detection of issues that usually fly under the radar and earlier warnings before performance hits.

IBM’s pitch is that Network Intelligence can help companies move away from having to react to outages. The service is designed to reduce alerts, make it easier to analyse problems, and catch rare or complicated issues that older monitoring tools can miss.

IBM is offering different subscription plans and a free tier for companies that want to test it in limited production environments before committing fully.

(Photo by Claudio Schwarz)

See also: IBM to offer watsonx AI tools on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

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