Collecting data
As an administrator, your goal is to ensure system availability for your users. To do this you need current and accurate data about the performance and health of your system. When you use BMC Helix Operations Management to monitor your infrastructure system, data collection is one of the initial activities that takes place. After you install the repository that contains PATROL Agents and knowledge modules (KM), BMC Helix Operations Management is ready to collect data for monitoring. Data is the information that is collected by BMC Helix Operations Management from your environment, such as the databases that your system uses or the operating systems in use.
BMC Helix Operations Management collects data on the basis of monitor policies. You can configure monitor policies to help your system understand what data to collect.
Sarah is a tenant administrator at Apex Global. During her work with Apex Global, she notices that some Oracle servers in their infrastructure do not perform up to their potential. These servers frequently go down when a problem occurs. The company faces a lot of downtime to correct a problem after it occurs. Sarah identifies the need for a robust data monitoring system that would warn about a problem before it occurs. For example, she wants a monitoring tool to warn about increased or decreased CPU usage of all the Oracle servers in her system. If she could get this information in time, she would be able to prevent system downtime by taking corrective actions. This would result into increased efficiency for Apex Global. After some market research, she recommends BMC Helix Operations Management to her organization. Apex Global acquires the required BMC Helix Operations Management license and Sarah sets out to configure the monitoring system according to the needs of her organization.
After speaking to the customer support team at BMC Software, Sarah chalks out the plan of action:
- Sarah creates a plan for data collection.
- She creates and deploys a package with the BMC PATROL for Oracle Database Monitoring KM to monitor their Oracle servers.
- She creates monitor policies to view the collected data. Sarah also understands that she can use REST APIs to manage policies.
After BMC Helix Operations Management starts collecting data, Sarah goes through the online product documentation and videos to learn more about the advance features that the product offers.
Sarah can now understand when their Oracle servers are performing less than their capacity. She can take corrective action before the servers go down.
As an administrator, collect data from monitored environments as explained in the following image and table:
| Task | Action | Role | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Begin data collection by planning your monitoring requirements. Decide what environments you want to monitor and in those environments what information you want to monitor. For example, you want to monitor CPU and memory utilization of your Windows operating systems. | Administrator/Operator | |
| 2 | Based on the information that you plan to monitor, create a deployable package. A deployable package contains a combination of a PATROL Agent and/or KMs. When you create the package for the first time, it must contain the PATROL Agent. In the future, the package might only contain KMs. All KMs are bundled into a repository. Important Use PATROL Agent 20.08 or later. | Administrator | |
| 3 | Next, deploy the package that installs its components. When you deploy the package with the PATROL Agent, the agent is added to the Agents page where you can manage agents and perform actions like restarting or reloading them. | Administrator | |
| 4 | After the packages are deployed, configure the KM how to connect to the environment that you want to monitor and what information to collect. For this purpose, create monitoring policies for all the KMs that you have deployed. Administrators can manage monitoring policies by using REST APIs. | Administrator | Policy, event data, and metric data management endpoints in the REST API |
| 5 | When you have configured monitoring policies, the KM starts sending data to BMC Helix Operations Management . You can view the collected data on the Monitoring > Devices page. Devices are created with the same name as the PATROL Agent that collects data. Administrators can manage metric and event data by using REST APIs, | Administrator/Operator | Policy, event data, and metric data management endpoints in the REST API |
| 6 | After monitor polices are configured, you can create alarm policies to set thresholds. Alarm policies monitor and manage the health of your system and safeguard against abnormalities. | Administrator |
In addition, you can import events by using:
-
BMC Helix Developer Tools
- uses a Fluentd-based framework for integration with BMC and third-party products to ingest event, CI, and topology data for monitoring in
BMC Helix AIOps
. It enables you to build custom integrations for the third-party products for which out-of-the-box integrations are not available, and collects logs from files. For more information, see
Integrating by using BMC Helix Developer Tools
. -
BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations
- uses REST APIs and Webhook mechanism for integration with BMC and third-party products to ingest event, CI, and topology data for monitoring in
BMC Helix AIOps
. It provides a click-and-connect capability to configure an integration. For more information, see
Integrating by using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations
.
- Event APIs - enable you to collect event data from third-party applications. For more information, see Event management endpoints in the REST API.
You can also import events from TrueSight Operations Management and third parties that have custom slots.
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