2020 enhancements

Review the BMC Helix Operations Management enhancements made available during 2020 for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users.

December 30, 2020

Support for copying policies and groups

You can now copy existing blackout policies, event policies, or groups and edit them to create new policies or groups quickly. For more information, see:

• Configuring blackout policies
• Creating and enabling event policies
• Configuring groups

Support for running PSL commands without host credentials

You can now run PSL commands on Agent Query Tool without entering host credentials if you are an administrator or a user with the manage_aqt_authentication permission. For more information, see Viewing and filtering agents.

December 18, 2020

Support for out-of-the-box event policy templates

You can now use out-of-the-box policy templates with predefined event selection criteria to process events and set up routine event-management actions. For more information, see Event policy types, evaluation order, and templates.

December 04, 2020

Support for agent tags

You can now use agent tags while defining an alarm policy selection criteria. You can filter host computers based on the agent tag names. The following example defines an alarm policy that will be applied only to host computers with the production agent tag name. For more information, see Configuring alarm policies.

Support for specifying three-digit time values

You can now use values up to three digits for specifying time while defining an alarm policy selection criteria. For example, 120 min.

September 23, 2020

Next-generation SaaS solution available on BMC Helix Portal

BMC Helix Portal is a SaaS solution with built-in common services on a microservices-based architecture. The product also offers a set of integrated BMC Helix products from a single, unified view for an improved end-user experience. You can navigate easily between applications without the need for separate authentication or integration. You can use common services such as user management, tenant management, and single sign-on for the BMC products that are integrated on BMC Helix Portal.

Anomaly detection powered by AI/ML

BMC Helix Operations Management anomaly detection uses unsupervised learning methods to determine when a service is behaving abnormally. The Random Cut Forest algorithm analyzes the input time-series data to detect anomalies. Time-series data consists of a group of selected metrics and KPIs. With this feature, you can:

• Detect anomalies for both multivariate and univariate metrics.
• Understand the basis of metric and do event probable-cause analysis.
• Control event sensitivity using anomalous score settings.
• Visualize anomaly events in a stacked graphical format.

For more information, see Variate Policies.

Enhanced event enrichment

This release supports new event policy types for performing advanced enrichment and time-based enrichment of events. 

The advanced enrichment policy can help you enrich other event slots in addition to those that are configurable with basic enrichment. You can also set up advanced actions for processing events. 

Time-based enrichment is like an extension of advanced enrichment, which is available to you as a separate policy type to cater to a specific use case. 

Also, note that the Enrichment policy type is now renamed to Basic Enrichment.

For more information, see Event policy types, evaluation order, and templates.

External metric data ingestion

You can now ingest time-series metric data from external sources to BMC Helix Operations Management by using REST APIs.

For more information, see Performing metric operations with the REST API.  

Enhanced event API endpoints 

You can now update an event by using REST API endpoints. At a time, you can only update a single event class.

The dup_detect facet is supported on event API endpoints.  

For more information, see Managing events with REST APIs.

Custom event table views

You can now create custom event table views and rearrange the width and order of the columns. As an administrator, you can create global table views.

For more information, see Creating table views.

Visualizations powered by BMC Helix Dashboards

This release introduces BMC Helix Dashboards, a SaaS service on BMC Helix Portal that provides the ability to create interactive dashboards. You can customize the dashboards in multiple ways to gain valuable insights into your system.

The out-of-the-box dashboards available are:

• Event Data dashboard
  Displays the number of open events and their severity, and the number of closed events. Also displays the trend of open events in your environment.
  
  
• Metrics Data dashboard
  Displays the performance metrics data that provides an insight into the health of the devices in your environment.

For more information about dashboards, see  the BMC Helix Dashboards documentation .

Visualization and analysis of logs by using BMC Helix Log Analytics

This release introduces BMC Helix Log Analytics, a SaaS service on BMC Helix Portal that leverages the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack to analyze and visualize logs. BMC Helix Log Analytics is an add-on service for BMC Helix Operations Management and enables you to:

• Filter logs in real time to derive insights.
• Use visualizations to view log data as charts, graphs, and tables.

For more information, see  Deriving insights by analyzing logs .

Common user-management service

All user-management functions are now performed centrally in BMC Helix Portal. 

You can view the BMC Helix Operations Management out-of-the-box roles and their related permissions in the BMC Helix Portal Roles and Permissions page. 

Authorization profiles provide role-based access control to specific entities in BMC Helix Operations Management and are managed in the BMC Helix Operations Management console.

PATROL Agent forward proxy support

You can now set up a forward proxy server between BMC Helix Operations Management and PATROL Agents 20.08 and later to create an additional layer of security. For more information, see  Configuring PATROL Agents to support a forward proxy server.

User-interface changes

This release introduces the following user-interface changes in the BMC Helix Operations Management console:

February 21, 2020

SaaS offering available on the BMC Helix platform

BMC Helix is a portfolio of SaaS offerings delivering cognitive service management (CSM) that is fast, accurate and cost-effective, across multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel environments. BMC Helix services are delivered from your cloud location of choice and receive the benefits of BMC's world-class SaaS Operations team and processes.

Tags for devices and events

Tags are logical containers to filter and group entities and events using the selection queries. The tag view lists all the tags and each tag contains the impact summary and status of all the logically grouped entities. 

For more information, see Viewing and monitoring groups.

Integration with BMC Helix ITSM

BMC Helix Operations Management integrates with BMC Helix ITSM to provide Proactive Service Resolution (PSR) so that event management and incident management are integrated with reduced human effort. This integration transforms infrastructure events into related infrastructure incidents.

For more information, see Integrating with BMC Helix ITSM.

Ability to abort KM deployment

If the installation of a KM has not started on the PATROL Agent, you can abort the deployment of the KM.

For more information, see Deploying packages.

Alarm policies

Alarm policies enable you to set static thresholds and generate alarms.

By default, a list of out-of-the-box alarm policies are available that can help you perform basic health monitoring.

For more information, see Alarm policies.

Event policies

Event policies enable you to set up routine event processing actions, and are of various types. You can use event policies to enrich event details, suppress events, and send notifications when specific events occur. 

For more information, see Event policy types, evaluation order, and templates.

Blackout policies

Blackout policies enable you to black out events originating from various devices. Blackout policies change the status of matching events to BLACKOUT and do not stop data collection. You can configure one-time or recurring blackout policies. 

For more information, see Blackout policies.

Data compression

Compression of data between PATROL Agents and BMC Helix Operations Management saves network bandwidth and reduces latency. 

Device instance hierarchy

The Device Details page displays instances in hierarchy. From Table View, select Hierarchy.

For more information, see Viewing collected data.

Event analysis

BMC Helix Operations Management provides machine-guided event analysis and intelligently groups events into clusters. You can easily identify hotspots in an event flood.

For more information, see Analyzing event clusters for quick insights.