User authentication

BMC Dashboards for BSM provides three options for user authentication:

• LDAP allows you to use your LDAP server to authenticate users.
• BMC Atrium Single Sign-On (BMC Atrium SSO) authentication supports many authentication protocols and provides single sign-on and single sign-off for users of BMC products.
• Internal authentication uses an internal database of users and passwords. If you choose to create an internal database, the user names and passwords will not be in sync with the LDAP server. If a user changes their password in the LDAP system, the password will not be replicated to the BMC Dashboards for BSM database.

After installing the product using one type of authentication, you can run the product installation utility to easily reconfigure the authentication type.

BMC Atrium SSO

BMC Atrium SSO is an authentication system that supports many authentication protocols and provides single sign-on and single sign-off for users of BMC products. The system allows a user to present credentials only once for authentication and subsequently be automatically authenticated by every BMC product that is integrated into the system.

This authentication method requires that you must have previously installed the BMC Atrium SSO server and configured it with an authentication server such as LDAP, RSA Secure ID, or others. For more information about installing and configuring the BMC Atrium SSO server, see the BMC Atrium Single Sign-On documentation portal at https://docs.bmc.com/docs/display/public/sso81/Home.

The benefit to BMC products that have BMC Atrium SSO as an authentication option is that all of the authentication protocols supported by BMC Atrium SSO are available to the product and any new protocols added are available without any product changes. The BMC Atrium SSO server and agents provide the needed integration into these systems so a product does not need to make any adjustments to their system. Furthermore, more advanced authentication schemes are possible with authentication chaining which allows greater flexibility in integrating to complex enterprise environments.