Integrating with BMC Helix Change Management

The integration of BMC Change Management with TrueSight Infrastructure Management enables you to create an automated blackout policy and schedule downtime for a Configuration Item (CI) in TrueSight Infrastructure Management. When TrueSight Infrastructure Management receives a change or a task request for scheduled maintenance, the associated CI goes into the blackout state. This prevents the generation of false alerts, alarms, and data for the CI.

Integration with BMC Helix CMDB is required for integration with BMC Helix Change Management.

Integrating BMC Change Management with TrueSight Infrastructure Management has the following benefits:

Enables TrueSight Infrastructure Management to receive notifications of change requests configured on specific CIs from BMC Change Management.
Enables the TrueSight console to display the attributes of the change requests that are configured in BMC Change Management.
Creates an automated blackout policy in the TrueSight console for the CI that you configure for maintenance in BMC Change Management. The Blackout policy ensures that no false alarms are generated for the CI that is scheduled for maintenance.

Click here to view an example scenario...

Jim is a network operations center (NOC) operator at a company that has multiple monitoring tools for its IT environment. The monitoring tools generate events for all changes that occur in the environment. 
Due to lack of communication between users who introduce these changes and the NOC operators, the NOC operators end up troubleshooting events generated by known change requests, wasting time and resources. The integration of BMC Change Management with TrueSight Infrastructure Management allows Jim to reduce the number of events generated by changes introduced in the environment. The integration allows him to automatically block and notify users of any change including:

Blackouts (unplanned or emergency changes)
Scheduled maintenance (planned changes)
 Any change to devices, service, or application (start and end of changes) including a configuration change
Any change to applications (start and end of changes) including configuration.

For example, the user should be notified that a patch would be applied on device 23. For example, Roger, the distributed server operations user, requests Rahul, the Change Coordinator, to schedule a security patch update for selected servers. Jim has configured an automated CI blackout policy for change requests received through BMC Remedy ITSM. This policy:

Marks all events occurring the in scheduled time period for that CI to blackout
Automatically schedules downtime of PNet Schedule downtime in BPPM for change requests received through ITSM.
Stops data collection
Stops Alarms and abnormalities generation
Sets CI to maintenance mode

Becky, the Event and Impact Management – Service Model administrator, requests that the status of CIs changed to Scheduled Downtime in the Service Model.
For this use case, the following procedure is followed:

Roger contacts Rahul about scheduling maintenance of the selected group of servers to apply the latest security patches.
Rahul schedules the server for the maintenance 2 weeks from the date of the request for 5 hours.
Jim receives an event in the TrueSight console notifying him of the upcoming maintenance. He also receives a notification that the Cell Blackout Policy and PNET downtime schedule was created.
When the date of maintenance arrives, the event status is modified in the TrueSight console to notify him of that fact that now the designated servers are in down for scheduled maintenance. He also sees that all events received from the CIs that represent the servers that are now in maintenance, are set to blackout state.
Becky sees that the CIs status representing servers is changed to Blackout in the Service Model.
When at the end of the scheduled down period, the Change request is marked as completed, Jim observes that the event status is modified to Completed and validates that the Blackout Policy and PNET Schedule downtime are removed. Events received for the CIs reflect the actual state of the CIs. Jim also receives Event Status Closed for the event that was originally generated from the change request.
Becky observes that CIs status is back to normal state in the Service Model.

For detailed information about installing, configuring, and using this solution, see the BMC Helix Change Management documentation Open link . The following diagram depicts the architecture of this integration:

TrueSight to Helix Change Management integration updated

Internal processes involved in the TrueSight Operations Management environment

The following components are involved:

Rest Webservice EventProvider—Receives event notifications from the ITSM change management in the JSON format over the rest webservice. The component converts this event notification into an NGP event and sends it to jserver, which is the event processor component, through the jserver facade.
Event Processor—Receives the NGP event from the webservices Eventprovider component. The component does any pre-processing required on the event then sends the event to the cell.
Event Selector—Receives the event from the gatewayEvent handler. If the event is a change event or some other event of concern, the Event Selector sends the event to the RuleConfigurator asynchronously.
Rule Configurator—Has two major components: RuleConfiguratorConsumer, and RuleConfiguratorWorker.
The RuleConfiguratorConsumer is controlled by the RuleConfiguratorConsumerManager, which gets started when the JSERVER is initialized. The RuleConfiguratorManager starts the different RuleConfiguratorConsumer threads, which feeds the data to RuleConfigurator. The RuleConfigurator includes the PolicyConfigurator and ScheduleConfigurator. The PolicyConfigurator uses BlackOutPolicyCrud to create a blackout policy. The ScheduleConfigurator uses ScheduleConfiguratorCrud APIs to schedule down time.

Configuring the integration

Complete the following tasks to integrate with BMC Helix Change Management:

For troubleshooting information, see Troubleshooting the BMC Helix Change Management integration.

Integrating with BMC Helix Change Management

Internal processes involved in the TrueSight Operations Management environment

Configuring the integration

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