BMC Helix Operations Management with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), a key part of the BMC Helix ServiceOps platform, uses predictive capabilities to proactively improve the performance and availability of IT services across multicloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to manage the complexity and scale of IT operations (ITOps) while delivering fast time-to-value, ease of use, integration via open APIs, and reduced operational costs.
The October 2022 release is available now and offers several significant enhancements to:
- AIOps
- Public cloud monitoring
- Kubernetes monitoring
- Security
- Platform support
What’s New in AIOps
Situation Explainability
Situations uses an AI/ML-based event processing technique to identify event patterns from hundreds of raw events, reduce noise, and automatically group similar events together and associate them with a service. To understand and explain Situations, a new feature called “situation summary” provides easily readable insight based on natural language processing (NLP) to describe the problem and its root cause. This helps the service operator or site reliability engineer (SRE) understand the situation context easily, and whether it needs immediate action based on the underlying cause and severity of the problem.
Figure 1. NLP based natural language Situation summary
Service Insights
Service insights uses an AI/ML-based, auto-detection engine that monitors applications automatically and continuously analyzes data for signs of trouble to help ITOps teams make sense of the overwhelming data and more precisely identify trends that are often difficult to pinpoint.
This release also extends service insights based on events data to provide visibility into service performance and availability. It helps discover the behavior of events, their severity, the number of critical and major events, whether they increased or decreased, and their impact to the given service. You can use these insights to take actions proactively to improve service health.
Figure 2. Service insights based on events
Service Predictions
Service Predictions provides predictive analytics to predict and prevent service outages. It analyzes service health indicators or key performance metrics and their interdependencies to forecast the service impact. As an operator, you can monitor the list of prediction events that might impact a service, along with their predicted severity and first impact occurrence, so proactive actions can be taken to solve the problem before it reaches users.
Figure 3. Service Predictions dashboard
Business Service Risk Dashboard:
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can see risks and resource congestion for business services. This helps to proactively detect saturations and gives the opportunity to make changes before any service impact occurs. The latest release will bring all business services into the single Service Risk Dashboard that shows potential risks to the performance and availability of services using health KPIs based on business drivers and performance metrics.
Figure 4. Service Risk Dashboard
Forecasting as a Service Tool (FaaST)
FaaST is a great new way for customers to see, try, and learn about the powerful metric-forecasting capabilities in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. Metric forecasting is a critical capability for any organization that wants to move from reactive to proactive (e.g., Are my orders going to exceed my capacity this month? At this rate of storage consumption, when will I run out?). BMC Helix Continuous Optimization leverages multiple algorithms to identify the most accurate view of the future, giving users more time to plan and respond.
Figure 5. FaaST results page
Public Cloud Monitoring
In additional to the existing Google Cloud monitoring capability, we’ve expanded our public cloud monitoring coverage for leading cloud platforms Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Public cloud services and additional metrics have been included in the existing cloud monitoring services.
The following are the additional services included for public cloud monitoring:
Figure 6. Public cloud monitoring
Kubernetes Monitoring
We’ve introduced the monitoring solution deployment as Kubernetes DaemonSet, which improves monitoring scalability and includes additional metrics for persistent volume, replicaset, statefulset, deployment, and replication controller.
Security
BMC Helix Monitor Agent (Patrol) gets additional security enhancement with AES-GCM cypher support and Proxy support for Solaris, AIX, and HP UX.
Additional Platform Support
With this release, BMC Helix monitoring now supports RHEL9.x and Ubuntu 22.4.
Highlights from BMC Helix Operations Management October 2022
Several key features have been introduced for event management in this release of BMC Helix Operations Management:
- Modify event slot from BMC Helix Operations Management user interface (UI)
- Users can change the event slot values from UI on on-demand basis.
- Delete Event—UI and API support
- Users can delete events from the BMC Helix Operations Management UI or with the API support
- Timeframe support for event policies
- Timeframe support can be configured for all the event policies
Figure 7. Modify event
Log Archive and Restore
While we ingest and retain data for up to 30 days, this data is stored in hot storage by default and is purged after 30 days. You may need to retain data for longer duration to meet audit and compliance requirements, optimize storage, reduce costs, and identify patterns and trends, or to conduct on-demand troubleshooting and diagnostics.
With the new log archival feature available in the latest release of both the SaaS and on-premises solution, an IT administrator can archive the data to a low-cost cold storage solution for long-term retention.
Highlight from the log archive and restore are:
- Fields extraction
- Enables users to parse and extract fields (key-value pairs) from log records
- BMC Helix Dashboards for Log Analytics
- Monitor and visualize log data from AWS, Kubernetes log monitoring, and log events monitoring
If you need to search any data in cold storage, you can restore it back for querying and analysis.
Figure 8. Logs archival and restore
New Connectors with Intelligent Integration
New connectors are provided to collect events, metrics, and topology data from third-party products such as Azure Monitor, VMWare Aria Operations, and Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (NNMi). In addition, you can deploy the BMC Helix intelligent integrations gateway in your on-premises environment to collect and send data to BMC Helix applications.
With this release we’ve introduced new connectors with intelligent integration for VMware vRealize Operations and Microsoft Azure, and made further integration enhancements to our AWS Connector and NNMi.
Learn more about BMC Helix IT Operations Management
For a quick overview of the new features in the October 2022 release of BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, refer to the release notes. To learn more about the new features in BMC Helix Log Analytics, watch the What’s new in Helix Log Analytics October 2022 video and review the release notes.
For a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes, check out the BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps product documentation and BMC Helix Log Analytics product documentation and product overview video.
We encourage you to try both now from the BMC Helix cloud. Sign up for free here!
You can also join us on the BMC Helix Operations Management community forum to discuss any of the new features and workflows, or share suggestions to improve the product experience.
A big thanks to all the BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps users who contributed by submitting PRs, bug reports, and feedback!
