Orientation

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation is an automation aggregator that enables organizations to connect with a number of automation tools to define policies to trigger remediation actions.

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation acts as a Manager of Managers for connecting with third-party automation tools. It listens to the incoming events from various data sources, such as BMC Helix Operations Management and BMC Helix AIOps and enables automation teams to quickly build automation policies and define remediations for the incoming events.

The following video (3:47) provides an overview of BMC Helix Intelligent Automation:

&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br/&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;

https://youtu.be/aVACdzvqK_c

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation benefits

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation enables you to achieve the following objectives:

Automate without any programming experience: Automaton engineers do not require any prior programming experience. They can use the intuitive UI to create automation policies.
Reduced number of service desk tickets: Automation policies created by the automation engineers reduce the number of tickets logged for the service desk.
For example, if the services of a Windows computer are down, you do not need to log a ticket. An event is created and through the Remediate Windows Service Down automation policy, services are restarted automatically.
Eliminate operational cost: Clean-up unused resources through automations and save unnecessary expenses.
Deliver a seamless customer experience: With BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, you can use plugins to connect with third-party automation tools and BMC applications. BMC Helix Intelligent Automation gathers events from the cloud services and responds to the events by using triggers and automations to automate cloud operations.

Event providers for BMC Helix Intelligent Automation

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation connects with the following products to gather events:

BMC Helix Operations Management: Provides the event data for creating automation policies in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
BMC Helix AIOps: Provides the event data for creating automation policies in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
BMC Helix Capacity Optimization: Provides the event data for overallocated containers in Kubernetes, which triggers a policy in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.

Automation through policies

Automation engineers create automation policies that contain actions to remediate an event. These policies can be triggered automatically when the trigger conditions match the conditions in the policy or manually from the event provider, BMC Helix AIOps.

While creating a policy, you choose an application with which you want to connect and then define the actions to be included in the policy. When you publish a policy, it is saved in the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation database. The next time the same event is received by BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, the published policy is automatically invoked.

Data flow in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation is a service with virtual layers of components that interact through internal and external APIs and provide you with triage and remediation of events through policies.

The following components in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation manage the events received:

Data sources
Queue and service
Plugins and cloud actions

Data sources

Data sources publish events for BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to consume. For BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, data sources include BMC Helix Operations Management and BMC Helix AIOps.

Queue and service

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation consumes events published by various cloud services. Events are matched with existing policy definitions using predefined trigger conditions. If a matching policy definition is found, a policy instance is created. The policy instance guides BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to invoke actions on target applications using plugins.

Plugins

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation connects with on-premise automation tools and applications via plugins. A plugin receives action requests generated by the automation policy execution, and performs actions on the automation tools and applications. After executing the actions, the plugin sends the response back to the automation service. The plugin uses the REST interface to interact with the target automation tools and applications.

You can create more than one plugin depending on your requirements. For example, if you have multiple datacenters, you can create one plugin for each datacenter. Or you can create multiple plugins for one datacenter if you want to access a group of or each automation tool and application in the datacenter with a dedicated plugin.

Event management lifecycle in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation

The event management lifecycle starts when an event is received by a data source.

A data source submits an event into BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation matches the event to one or more trigger conditions associated with policy definitions.
When one or more trigger conditions match with the event, policy instances are created.
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation submits the request to an application via a plugin.
The application performs triage and remediation.
You can view the results of this action on the History page on the product interface.