In today’s dynamic, cloud environments, IT teams that include DevOps, IT operations, site reliability engineering (SRE), and platform engineering need a way to get accurate and easy-to-setup insights from large volumes of observability data. Without proper tooling to glean comprehensive insight across thousands of key performance indicators (KPIs), IT teams face slow reaction times, which can lead to service degradation. Manual analyses are no longer enough. The 24.1 release of the BMC Helix IT Operations Management portfolio demonstrates our investment in applying more practical use cases for causal, generative, and predictive AI.
Figure 1: Best Action Recommendation Example
We have enhanced our solutions with that include Advanced Anomaly Detection and a patented BMC HelixGPT-Powered Best Action Recommendation (BAR) for AIOps using BMC HelixGPT. We also added updates of our observability solution, described in further detail below. With these key enhancements, modern IT teams can:
Improve service reliability with Advanced Anomaly Detection
- Autodetect all anomalies using one-click configuration across your cloud services and infrastructure
- Fine-tune anomaly detection to unique environments with adjustable sensitivity
- Combine static thresholds and machine learning (ML) to identify both the known unknowns and unknown unknowns
Resolve incidents quickly and easily with generative AI
- Utilize knowledge from past incidents, situations, and remediation actions to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR)
- Use patented BAR insights to accelerate your response
- Get a sample code recommendation using BAR
Optimize performance and resource utilization
- Understand and act on trends more quickly with a combination of Advanced Anomaly Detection and BAR
- Find anomalies instantly, without domain knowledge or the need for query language
- Detect performance or resource bottlenecks more quickly without tedious configuration steps
Improve service reliability with Advanced Anomaly Detection
Advanced Anomaly Detection improves identification of issues and helps IT teams proactively find both known and unknown unknowns. IT environments are unique and complex, which makes setting thresholds complicated and time-consuming. Advanced Anomaly Detection (univariate) adds an autoconfiguration option to existing BMC Helix ML-based anomaly detection. Now, all KPIs are automatically analyzed and alerted on when the anomaly matches user-defined sensitivity settings. A single click enables anomaly detection for the entire environment, helping IT teams find previously unknown problems and saving time by eliminating tedious parameter configuration. Policies can still override the global settings across one time series (univariate anomaly detection), while also allowing for management of anomalies across multiple time series (multivariate anomaly detection).
Figure 2: Advanced Anomaly Detection Example
In combination with BMC Helix AIOps functionalities, Advanced Anomaly Detection events further enhance the Situations functionality, creating a powerful solution that allows IT teams to be proactive and find and fix issues faster.
BAR and BMC HelixGPT help IT remediate issues instantly
We are continuing to help IT teams be more productive with practical uses for our generative AI. Back in June, we announced BMC HelixGPT, embedded across the BMC Helix platform. BMC HelixGPT uses large language models (LLMs) trained on enterprise domain data. It becomes an expert in your IT environment. With the 24.1 release, we have added the BAR feature based on BMC HelixGPT to help IT practitioners resolve issues and eliminate days of troubleshooting.
Trained on past incidents, situations, and remediation actions, BAR uses generative AI algorithms to accelerate the time to resolution with actionable insights in a human-readable language—no need to learn another query language. Additionally, BAR can dramatically improve an IT team’s efficiency by using insights from similar correlated incidents to automatically generate code templates for the end user to fix an issue.
Figure 3: Best Action Recommendation with Ansible Code Snippet
Practical BAR examples
Let’s assume that your code update resulted in an increased CPU utilization that significantly strained host resources. To remediate the issue last time, an on-call SRE rolled back a code deploy, helping reduce CPU load. When a similar situation happens in the future, BAR will surface how the situation was resolved and help recommend a potential resolution with the steps provided to resolve the problem.
If you are experiencing longer than expected response times on your requests (slow queries or similar), it may be due to higher-than-expected resource utilization. BAR provides guidance on how to fix the issue. In this case, it recommends running the script to increase the storage space or other pegged resource and then restarting a Kubernetes pod.
Another practical use would be to help recommend patching. Let’s assume you missed patching a set of host instances with the latest security or operational updates. Based on past resolutions, BAR will be able to help you identify what was missed and recommend implementing the latest patch.
The applications of BAR are virtually limitless.
Observability enhancements bring more comprehensive visibility
New BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations enhance IT coverage
We have expanded BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations with Icinga, allowing our customers to get enhanced visibility into their tooling, as well as bring and correlate new data sources into BMC Helix. In this release, we also enhanced our existing connectors, including Entuity, Zabbix, Prometheus, SolarWinds, Datadog, VMware vRealize Operations (vROPS), Cisco AppDynamics, and CA UIM. With these updated connectors, BMC Helix IT Operations Management solutions provide better coverage and visibility into data from these tools, helping IT to quickly navigate to a specific issue. For details, please refer to our documentation.
Better control and security with flexible log index management
With this release, BMC Helix AIOps capabilities, specifically those in BMC Helix Log Analytics, deliver enhanced security and allow better control over log data. Now, IT practitioners get flexible log management with multi-index support per tenant. With this flexible log segregation and archival duration, IT teams can better manage security and costs.
Enhanced BMC Helix Discovery Technology Knowledge Updates content
Now, BMC Helix Discovery Technology Knowledge Updates (TKU) content is expanded with new cloud, software, storage, and network solutions. BMC Helix Discovery continues to lead the industry with comprehensive, out-of-the-box discovery coverage, enabling IT teams to automatically discover and map their IT assets and dependencies with unparalleled accuracy. BMC Helix Discovery provides even more comprehensive visibility into complex IT landscapes, helping IT teams optimize operations, reduce risk, and accelerate digital transformation. For the full list, please see our documentation.
If you wish to check these out, please contact sales.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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