Understanding Server group operations

In a server group, the admin server can be the primary owner of one or more specific roles. Each role represents a specific BMC Remedy AR System application or component. In any server group implementation, no matter how simple, there is one server that is configured the administration role. This is typically the first server installed and is used to perform all administration operations for the server group. Because all of the servers share the same database, this allows the group to be managed as if it were a single server. 

Other servers can be assigned specific primary roles. For example, a server might be dedicated to just one specific primary task, such as Approval Server, while another server might be setup as a primary server to host a group of roles that might be closely related such Atrium CMDB and Atrium Integration Engine. The primary roles are configured on the AR System Server Group Operation Ranking form, and each server should have at least one other server configured for failover. 

Following is the complete list of server group operations for BMC software, as supported by the AR System Server Group Operation Ranking form.

(Click the image to expand it.)

• Administration — Performs all administration tasks for the entire server group.
• Approval Server — The approval server provides the approval functionality within BMC Remedy applications. An approval represents the signature or acknowledgment of an individual where required in a process. The approval server records all necessary information to provide an audit trail and proof of authenticity of all approvals.
• Archive — The archive feature of BMC Remedy AR System provides a convenient way to periodically store data (not definitions) from a form to an archive form; this reduces the amount of data accessed during searches on the main form thus improving system performance. Archiving applies to all types of forms, except display-only forms.
• Assignment Engine — Using processes instead of workflow, the Assignment Engine enables you to automatically assign requests to individuals. The assignment method determines who is assigned to an issue when more than one person matches the qualification.

• Atrium Integrator — Atrium Integrator is an integration engine that enables you to transfer data from external data stores to BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (BMC Atrium CMDB) classes. You can connect to a wide variety of input sources using connectors such as JDBC, ODBC, JMS, native databases, web services, and complex XML. Atrium Integrator provides you with the ability to clean and transform your data before putting it into BMC Atrium CMDB.

  Note

  Atrium Integration Engine is replaced by Atrium Integrator since version 9.0.

• Business Rules Engine — The business rules engine is a component of BMC Service Level Management that is used to interpret stored rules to construct the filters that are required to implement the rules. The main form that the business rules engine is the SLA:Business Rules form which contains references to objects required to create a filter.
• CMDB — BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database. This is a core component of any IT Service Management (ITSM) environment and adds substantial value to a simple Incident Management environment. Specifically, it makes incident management more efficient by providing support staff and IT management an up-to-date image of their production IT environment.
• Cognitive Training Service — Cognitive Training Service is an operation using which you can train to classify natural language. For example, you can auto-categorize an incoming ticket to a specific person based on the trends that are derived from the previously assigned tickets. Training can be done by using the previous tickets or by using a .csv file that has a one-to-one mapping (one input field with one output field) or a many-to-one mapping (many input fields with one output field). Cognitive training service integrates with the Innovation Suite, which in turn, integrates with IBM Watson to train and categorize data.
• DSO — (For On-premises deployments only) The BMC Remedy Distributed Server Option (DSO) is used to build large-scale, distributed environments that behave like a single virtual system. DSO enables an organization to share common information among geographically distributed servers and to keep that information consistent. DSO enables you to transfer requests between servers and to keep copies of a request synchronized across multiple servers, even if those servers are geographically dispersed.
• Escalation — An escalation is an action or group of actions performed on the server at specified times or time intervals. Basically, an escalation is an automated, time-based process that searches for requests that match certain criteria at specified times and takes actions based on the results of the search. For example, an escalation can trigger BMC Remedy AR System to notify the next level of management if a problem is not assigned to a technician within one hour of submission.
• Flashboards — A real-time visual monitoring tool that can show the state of service operations, warn about potential problems, and collect and display trend data.
• Full Text Index — Full text index is the indexing feature for the full text search (FTS) method used in BMC Remedy AR System to search for text in long text fields or attached documents. It is typically much faster than using the native database searching functionality.
• Reconciliation Engine — The reconciliation engine is a patent-pending component of the BMC Atrium CMDB. The reconciliation engine is based on business rules, which allow you to leverage existing data coming from third-party asset or discovery tools. The solution does not lock you into any one vendor's discovery tools or existing asset repositories.
• Service Failover — In the Remedy AR System environment, companion services provide services such as the Email Engine sending outgoing emails and handling incoming emails. You can deploy these services in a server group, which provides resiliency if something fails. The servers in the group cooperate to manage service failover. The server group manages when the companion services become active to perform tasks and when they are suspended. Also, the companion services are tracked and can fail over independently of any AR System server.

• SLM Collector — This process is used to handle SLM Collector failover in a server group environment.

  Note

  SLM Collector is not supported since version 9.1.04. It is listed in Server Group Ranking for backward compatibility.

  
  

Related topic

Configuring server groups