As businesses rapidly expand, so, too, does the need for multiple products curated for specific use cases such as inventory management, infrastructure management, monitoring, incident and change management, and so on. The list gets bigger as your organization grows. Sometimes, specialized teams are responsible for managing these solutions from deployment to maintenance, while other times, one team manages multiple vendor solutions.
Every product has historical data, which is useful if viewed from that product perspective, but it becomes a gold mine of actionable insights when viewed together. The BMC Helix platform gives you this capability in one consolidated view. But how easy is it to aggregate this data into one source? The good news is that the need to write a custom script is over because BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations removes this complexity, making it less error-prone and making life easier for end users.
On top of it, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, which is part of the BMC Helix platform, uses consolidated data from third-party sources as well as data from BMC monitoring products and applies analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate and enhance IT operations. It uses predictive capabilities to proactively improve performance and availability of IT services.
BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is also embedded with remediation capabilities to resolve events using automation policies. Overall, this provides an end-to-end solution by ingesting third-party data using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations and applying analytical, predictive, and remedial capabilities using BMC Helix AIOps.
To understand this better, BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations offers a systematic, automated approach to distributing valuable operations data, including event, metric, and topology information gathered from cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid deployment structures, to the BMC Helix platform. BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations is a simple, scalable, resilient, and easy-to-configure product, reducing integration time from months to minutes. Advantages include:
- Quick and easy process of enabling integrations
- Continuous data flow per your configuration
- Cost, time, and resource savings
Figure 1. BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations overview architecture.
BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations support multiple types of applications, including application performance monitoring, cloud applications, and monitoring applications, etc.
The process to configure the application connection is easy.
- Comply with the pre-requisites of a connector as specified in BMC documentation.
- Add credentials to connect to third-party application.
- Specify the data you want to bring (events, metrics, topology) per applicability.
- Specify more parameters like collection schedule, data latency threshold, etc.
- Save and start data streaming.
Figure 2. BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations in action.
As one of the examples, you can refer to BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations Splunk Enterprise connector documentation and video.
As you see in Figure 1, the Event and Metric data is fed into BMC Helix Operations Management while Topology information is fed into BMC Helix Discovery.
But what does a user need to do to get value out of consolidated data?
This is where the magic of BMC Helix AIOps comes into the picture. BMC Helix AIOps is a multi-layered technology platform that leverages big data to automate and enhance IT operations through analytics and AI/ML. Here is how you can get the most out of your consolidated data:
- Improved event management—Events from third-party products are used to supplement existing monitoring systems, which helps to provide a comprehensive IT monitoring view and reduce the number of false positives. This results in noise reduction.
- Data correlation—Data ingested from third-party sources is used by AIOps to correlate incidents across different IT products. This enables AIOps to present potential root causes more accurately.
Figure 3. BMC Helix AIOps console shows a situation when multiple events are aggregated and correlated.
- Root cause analysis—Third-party configurable item (CI) information can be used to identify the underlying cause of incidents, especially when they are caused by changes in the IT infrastructure. This information can also be used to identify and prioritize critical systems and services.
Figure 4. BMC Helix AIOps console shows consolidated events from Dynatrace and root cause isolation with top three impacted nodes.
- Predictive intelligence—Integrating CI information from third-party sources can help predict potential failures and allow proactive maintenance, reducing downtime and improving the availability of IT systems to make IT monitoring proactive instead of reactive.
- Remediation—BMC Helix AIOps also provides the capability to remediate events using BMC Helix Intelligent Automation and enable automatic or manual remediation mode.
Figure 5. Remediation capability.
Overall, the integration of third-party events, alerts, and CI information can provide a more complete picture of the IT landscape, enabling AIOps systems to make better decisions and improve the overall reliability and performance of IT operations. All of this ultimately results in saving costs, resources, and time for your organization.
To learn more about how BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations brings data together and gives you power to apply analytics and AI/ML capabilities using the BMC Helix platform.
You can also join us on the BMC Helix Community forum to discuss any of the new features and workflows or share suggestions to improve the product experience.
To speak with BMC, please reach out to your BMC sales representative or BMC support team.
