Using BMC Helix Dashboards

BMC Helix Dashboards is a SaaS service on the BMC Helix Portal that provides the ability to create interactive dashboards for the metrics of the entities that are managed by BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. You can customize the dashboards in multiple ways to gain valuable insights into your system. BMC Helix Dashboards enhance the set of analysis supported by BMC Helix Continuous Optimization by providing additional customization capabilities for graphical representation. 

BMC Helix Dashboards offer unified reporting that gives you a consolidated view of data from the integrated products, such as BMC Helix Continuous Optimization and BMC Helix Operations Management. You can create dashboards that source data from applications across your environment. You can easily export and share dashboards with users within or outside your environment. You can also use template variables to reuse dashboard panels. For more information about the dashboards, see the  BMC Helix Dashboards documentation Open link .

Related topics

Analyzing the capacity of your resources using BMC Helix Dashboards

Grafana documentation Open link

Metrics browser Open link

Prometheus QL Open link

Creating custom dashboards for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization in BMC Helix Dashboards

For BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, you can configure custom dashboards, panels, and queries to quickly start creating visualizations to get an insight of your IT infrastructure. As a tenant administrator or an editor, you need to build queries in panels in BMC Helix Dashboards to fetch data from the data source. You can build multiple queries with different query types in a panel. However, you cannot change the data source for each query in a panel. If you want to change the data source, you must create a new panel. You can also select a visualization type for the panel. 

For building queries to fetch the performance metrics data of the servers in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, you must select the Metric as query type and Optimize as source in the Query section.

Complete the following tasks:

  1. Log in to BMC Helix Portal as a capacity planner.
    Note: Ensure that the Editor role is assigned to the capacity planner user.
  2. Click the BMC Helix Dashboards tile.
  3. On the left navigation pane, do one of the following actions:
    • Hover the mouse over the Create icon  and then click Dashboard.
    • Hover the mouse over the Dashboards icon , click Browse, and then click the New Dashboard button.
  4. On the New dashboard page, click Add new panel.
  5. In the Query section, select the BMC Helix data source for the query.
  6. In the Query Type field, select Metric.

  7. In the Source field, select Optimize.
  8. In the Query field, add the following data and save the query.

    FieldDescription
    Query TypeSelect the query type as Metric.
    Source

    Select the source as Optimize.

    Metrics browser

    Type a metric query to this field or expand metric browser to build basic queries using required metrics and labels.

    As you type your query, you will receive label suggestions based on the available metrics. The following video explains how to use the metrics browser to build a basic query.

    Following is a list of some of the labels that you can use for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization:

    • metric (string): VictoriaMetric metric name using the label as "__name__".
    • entid (number): Identifier of the entity, such as sysid, wkldid, and appid.
    • entname (string): Name of the entity. It could vary over time. 
    • enttype (string): Entity type, such as system, application, or business driver types. You can use the entity prefix in the query. For example, to extract data for  Virtual Cluster - VMware entity type, use the enttype as sys:vh:vmw. For information on all entity types supported in  BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, see Entity types.
    • resname (string): Label for the monitored resource. For example, filesystem "/root", disk "sda", interface "eth0".
    • restype (string): Type of the resource defined in the resname label. For example storage:filesystem, storage:disk, network:interface.
    • resid (uuid, string): UUID of the resource.
    • source (string): Use when multiple sources load the same metric without overwriting each other samples possible values.
      • "opt:meas":  measured generic
      • "opt:meas:vn": virtual node
      • "opt:der": derived series
      • "opt:mod": model
      • "opt:ind": indicator
    • inputstat (string): Statistic used for the metric, such as avg, min, max, and value.

    For examples of the metric query type, see Examples.

    Legend

    Add a legend to appear in the panel.

    You can use a variable here. For example, the value of the {{hostname}} variable is replaced with the host name in the panel.

    Min stepAdd a threshold for a lower limit of the Prometheus query. This setting is absolute, and cannot be changed by the value in the Resolution field.
    Resolution

    Sets the parameter for each pixel to correspond to one data point of a Prometheus range query. Use lower resolutions for better performance.

    For more information, see Prometheus data source Open link .

    Format

    Select one of the following formats for the panel:

    • Time Series
    • Table
    • Heatmap
    Instant

    Use this toggle button to return only the latest value for the requested time series. Instant queries return results faster than the normal range queries.

  9. Enter a name for the dashboard, select a folder, and click Save. The new dashboard is displayed with the relevant data.

Examples

Here are a few examples of the Metric query type:

Use caseQueriesVisualization
View the memory utilization details for the Kubernetes cluster.

MEM_UTIL{enttype="sys:kubernetes:cluster", entname="$Cluster"} * 100

Gauge


View the pod usage within the Kubernetes cluster.(SUM(KPOD_NUM{entname="$Cluster"})/SUM(KPOD_NUM_MAX{entname="$Cluster"}))*100Gauge


View the CPU and memory utilization details for Kubernetes nodes.
  • (CPU_UTIL{enttype="sys:kubernetes:node"})
  • (MEM_UTIL{enttype="sys:kubernetes:node"})
Table


View the CPU usage trend for the Kubernetes cluster.
  • CPU_USED_NUM{enttype="sys:kubernetes:cluster", entname="$Cluster"} 
  • CPU_LIMIT{enttype="sys:kubernetes:cluster", entname="$Cluster"}
  • CPU_REQUEST{enttype="sys:kubernetes:cluster", entname="$Cluster"}
  • CPU_NUM{enttype="sys:kubernetes:cluster", entname="$Cluster"}
Time series


Cross-launch from BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to BMC Helix Dashboards

With the integration of BMC Helix Continuous Optimization with BMC Helix Dashboards, you can navigate to BMC Helix Dashboards by using the cross-launch option from the Views section of BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. The cross-launch option is available on the details page of the systems that are monitored by the PATROL Agent. You can view the device metrics data in BMC Helix Dashboards with this feature. This option is not available for systems that are not monitored by PATROL Agent.

To view the option for your devices in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, ensure that BMC Helix Operations Management, BMC Helix Dashboards, and BMC Helix Discovery are available on the same tenant. Ensure that you have the permissions to view the device metric details in BMC Helix Dashboards.

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