2021 enhancements

Review the BMC Helix AIOps enhancements made available during 2021 for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users.

November 19, 2021

Enable the Microsoft Teams integration to get details about impacted services and situations

BMC Helix AIOps integrates with Microsoft Teams to enable operators to use the BMC Helix application in Microsoft Teams. This provides real-time information about impacted services and situations in the form of messages and cards.

To enable this integration, Microsoft Teams administrators must install and configure the application for users in your organization. For more information, see Configuring BMC Helix application in Microsoft Teams.

To get details about the impacted services and situations as soon as they occur and to take timely actions to resolve the impact, you can perform one of the following actions: 

• Run commands in the Microsoft Teams application: As an operator, proactively run commands to retrieve specific details about impacted services or situations. For example, if you want to view all services with a severity as major, run the service severity major command. A service card appears and you can perform the card actions to resolve the impact. For more information, see Commands and actions available in Microsoft Teams.

• Create notification policies in BMC Helix AIOps: As a service designer, create notification policies in BMC Helix AIOps to send messages or cards to Microsoft Teams operator users or channels whenever a service is impacted or a situation is created. Operators can take actions based on the service or situation card and resolve the impact. For more information, see 2022-11-18_00-21-57_.Creating, editing, viewing, and deleting notifications vDec_2021. 

View causal event details by causal nodes or situations for impacted services

As an operator, to effectively perform ML-based root cause isolation of impacted services, you can view causal event details by causal nodes or situations in the Root Cause Isolation tab of the service details page. For more information, Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service.

Enhanced search capability on the Entities page

You can search any service by its name on the Entities > Services page. The service that matches the search term is displayed. You can use alphanumeric and special characters to search for a service. The search results are retained even if you switch between the Tile view or the Heatmap view. 

For more information, see Monitoring services. 

September 21, 2021

The following video (2:27) provides an overview of the features added to BMC Helix AIOps in June - September 2021 release:

 https://youtu.be/NtBEl00-0n4

View AIOps situations

You can subscribe to AIOps Situations, which uses the AI/ML algorithms to detect event noise automatically, cluster events, and displays situations. This reduces the mean time to detect and resolve issues significantly. The advantage of this ML-based Situations is that you do not need to create policies to create situations. 

You can enable the AIOps feature on the Manage Features page, and view the AIOps situations on the Situations page. 

For more information, see Monitoring service impact and situations by using AIOps.

View causal nodes using AIOps root cause isolation techniques

You can view the causal nodes of the impacted services derived from AIOps Situations. The AIOps root cause isolation feature uses machine learning techniques or algorithms to compute the root cause scores. The causal nodes are ranked and displayed based on the root cause score. The identification of root cause is done through the AI/ML-based Situations and it is different from the probable cause analysis (PCA) technique.

You can enable the AIOps Root Cause Isolation feature on the Manage Features page.

For more information, see Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service.

Enable the AIOps features

You can view AIOps-enabled situations and the root cause isolation and remediate them using automation techniques after you enable the following AIOps features. Only an administrator can enable these features. When enabled, they are available on a trial basis for the next 60 days.

• AIOps Root Cause Isolation: Enables you to view the AIOps-based root cause isolation. When not enabled, you can still view the probable cause analysis.
• AIOps Situations: Enables you to view the AIOps-based situations. 
• Intelligent Automations: Enables you to connect to BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
  

For more information, see Enabling the AIOps features.

Configure advanced settings for ML-based situations

Configure the following advanced settings for ML-based situations:

• Correlation event time window
• Situation stability window
• Show or hide policy-based situations
  

For more information, see Configuring ML-based situations.

Connectors update

The following connector types are added:

• Generic Connector: For all intergrations and data collection, except public cloud environments.
• Public Cloud Connector: PATROL Agent-based connector to collect data from public cloud environments. The connector is bundled with public cloud knowledge modules or monitoring solutions.
  
  

For more information, see Downloading and installing connectors for third-party integrations.

Introducing Self-help

Embedded self-help is available on UI pages. It provides guided assistance that helps you learn to use the product. From the Self-help pane, access relevant guided assistance, wiki topics, and videos.

Aug 23, 2021

Create event-driven remediation actions for situations

You can now create automations to remediate situational events. If you have permissions to create automation policies in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, you can directly launch it by using the Create Automation action on the the Situations > Investigate Situations page in BMC Helix AIOps.

If the trigger conditions defined in the published automation policies match with any of the open situational events, relevant remediation actions appear as automations on the Situations > Investigate page in the Automations column. Run these automations to resolve open situations.

For more information, see .Creating automation policies vDec_2021. 

View status of the automation actions 

You can view the status of a remediation action in the Automations column. Hover over the available automations to view the status of the last run automation. 

Click View all or the available automations link to view the status of each automation action. 

For more information, see .Remediating events for services and situations vDec_2021.

July 26, 2021

Connect with BMC Helix Intelligent Automation for event-driven remediation actions

BMC Helix AIOps connects with BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to provide remediation actions through automation policies for open causal and situational events.

To use this functionality, administrators must enable it on the Manage Product Features page. 

If the trigger conditions in any events match the conditions defined in the policies, relevant automations appear on the following pages in BMC Helix AIOps:

• Services > Root Cause Isolation
• Situations > Investigate Situations

You can run these automations to remediate the events. 

If you have permissions to create policies in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, you can directly launch BMC Helix Intelligent Automation and create policies for selected open events. You cannot create policies for situations. For more information, see Creating automation policies.

If you do not have permissions to create policies, you can raise a request for new automation policies. The request is sent to BMC Helix Intelligent Automation and an automation engineer creates relevant policies in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation. For more information, see Remediating events for services and situations. 

View related events and performance attributes for causal events

You can view the following additional details for causal events on the Services > Root Cause Isolation tab:

• Correlated events associated with the primary event in the Related Events tab
• Time-series data collected from key attributes of the causal events in the Performance View tab (applicable only to alarm class events)

For more information, see Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service. 

View Situations grouped by host names

Correlated events from BMC Helix Operations Management are now grouped by top three host names and displayed under the Situation Highlight section in the situation details view.

For more information, see Monitoring and investigating situations.

User Management menu option renamed to Users

The Configure > User Management option is renamed to Users. There is no change to the functionality.

For more information, see Onboarding and implementing.

May 27, 2021

View incident details

View the incidents for an impacted service after you drill down to a causal node in the service topology.

For more information, see Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service.

Upgrade a third-party integration

Upgrade an existing third-party integration to the latest version with minimal user intervention. If needed, first upgrade BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations Connector, and then continue with the integration upgrade in the same workflow.

For more information, see Upgrading third-party integrations.

Customize BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations event pipelines

Customize the out-of-the-box event pipelines that are used to transform third-party events into BMC Helix Platform events.

For more information, see Customizing the out-of-the-box event pipelines.

March 20, 2021

Launch from BMC Helix Portal

You can launch BMC Helix AIOps and BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations from BMC Helix Portal.

For more information, see  BMC Helix Portal documentation.

Integrate seamlessly with BMC Helix products for data ingestion

BMC Helix AIOps integrates seamlessly with BMC Helix Operations Management, BMC Helix Discovery, and BMC Helix ITSM to get metrics, events, incidents, and topology data.

For more information, see Data providers for BMC Helix AIOps.

Configure services by using BMC Helix Discovery

From BMC Helix AIOps, cross-launch to the Services & Applications page to configure services in BMC Helix Discovery.

For more information, see Modeling business services.

Use AI/ML algorithms for analytics

With BMC Helix AIOps AI/ML algorithms, you can:

• Analyze events, metrics, logs, and traces in real time
• Create meaningful and actionable insights

For more information, see Product overview.

Integrate third-party solutions by using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations

Use BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations to integrate third-party solutions to get events, configuration items (CIs), and topology data into BMC Helix AIOps. The following solutions are supported:

• Dynatrace
• SolarWinds NPM
• TrueSight Operations Management

For more information, see Integrating.

View your environment health summary

With BMC Helix AIOps, you can view the following information about key performance indicators (KPIs) and entities of your environment:

• Total events, anomalies, and incidents
• Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) for incidents
• Event noise reduction score
• Impact severity and availability of top services
• Event count and status of top situations

For more information, see Monitoring key performance indicators and entities.

Monitor service health

With BMC Helix AIOps, monitor service health by using the following information:

• Health timeline for a selected time range
• Root cause isolation for impacted services
• Causal events and change requests
• Metrics data for causal events

• Topology maps that show the relationship between a service and service nodes

For more information, see Monitoring service health and performing causal analysis.

Use the heatmap view to analyze service health

Use the heatmap view to analyze services on the Services page. The services are color-coded by severity.

For more information, see Monitoring service health and performing causal analysis.

View topologies for services

The topology is a visual representation of the relationship between a service and its nodes. In BMC Helix AIOps, the impacted nodes and paths are marked in red. A service topology helps you to perform the following actions:

• Determine the causal nodes and their position in the service path
• Identify the relationship between a service and its nodes
• View the node details

For more information, see Services and service topology and Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service.

View metrics for causal events

The metric data for causal events are collected and plotted as time-series graphs to show the abnormality or threshold violation. For example, abnormal spikes in CPU utilization or unusual growth in memory usage. 

For more information, see Service health score, impact score, and metrics and Performing ML-based root cause isolation of an impacted service.