Integrating with BMC Server Automation

BMC Server Automation helps manage, control, and enforce configuration changes in data centers. With the integration of BMC Server Automation, Infrastructure Management retrieves change information from BMC Server Automation for Probable Cause Analysis (PCA) candidates.

After you have set up the integration between the Infrastructure Management and the BMC Server Automation, you can create packages so that BMC Server Automation can deploy local agents to BMC Server Automation managed systems.

Benefits of BMC Server Automation integration

A BMC Server Automation job might change the configuration of a device, causing its behavior to change. Integrating Infrastructure Management with BMC Server Automation makes BMC Server Automation job history information available to probable cause analysis so that when you invoke probable cause analysis for an event, the probable cause analysis results page flags devices which have had BMC Server Automation jobs execute in the same time frame as the event that you are troubleshooting. In addition, certain events that are generated on Infrastructure Management trigger the execution of a predefined snapshot job on BMC Server Automation. This snapshot job detects the configuration changes made to the device.

Also see Leveraging BMC Server Automation integration for more benefits of the integration.

How does the BMC Server Automation integration work?

Packages can be created of all components in the Infrastructure Management Central Monitoring Repository. These packages are stored in BMC Server Automation, and then a BMC Server Automation job to deploy those packages to servers to be installed and configured is created.

To create packages for provisioning, you need to push packages from the base Infrastructure Management Central Monitoring Repository to BMC Server Automation, and then push packages from the extended Infrastructure Management Central Monitoring Repository to BMC Server Automation.

When you access probable cause analysis for a service degradation event, the probable cause analysis filters and ranks the events from most probable cause to least. The probable cause analysis results page indicates whether there has been a BMC Server Automation job executed on the device 24 hours before and 30 minutes after the current time stamp of the primary event. If a BMC Server Automation job has been executed on the device, the job name, job type, and start and end time of the job is displayed next to the device. For more information about probable cause analysis, see Determining the probable cause for an event.

The following BMC Server Automation job types are considered during probable cause analysis:

• Deploy Job (30) 
• Deploy Job Attempt (205) 
• File Deploy Job (40) 
• Network Shell Script Job (111) 
• Sync Job (190) 
  Deploy Apply Job (203) 
• Deploy Undo Job (204) 

• Snapshot Job

  Note

  Snapshot job executions are listed in the BladeLogic Device History page only if the snapshot job detects any changes.
  Batch jobs also are not listed in the probable cause analysis device history, unless the batch job contains any of the supported job types, such as a deploy job or a Network Shell Script job.