Working with events

Events are a way to keep track of configuration changes, incidents, application crashes or infrastructure upgrades. You can associate events to entities and track their history. They can be displayed on analysis charts in order to better understand, for instance, the performance impact of a hardware upgrade.

Events can be imported using ETL tasks, and can then be associated with domains and metrics manually or using a special task. At the end of this process, analysts can view events inside BMC Helix Continuous Optimization analyses and correlate them with performance and business driver KPIs. Manual creation of events is described in Managing events. 

Overview

The Event Reporting module is a tool used to collect and classify events and associate them to metrics. IT events may be roughly classified in two categories: macroscopic and microscopic events.

• A macroscopic event is the (potential) cause of a problem, the log of a problem, or the log of an activity. For example, a service unavailability or a database restart are macroscopic events. Macroscopic events are generally reported as low volumes of time-significant events. They are often reported as the result of human analysis or logging (journal).
• A microscopic event is the symptom of a problem or accident, and is traced as an effect. For example, tickets in a customer care platform are microscopic events. Microscopic events are generally reported as high volumes of brief events. Often, the cause of these events is uncertain, and the single event only traces the microscopic effect (for example, a specific customer could not connect to the web site).

The obvious differences, both in scope and frequency, of the above mentioned types of events lead to a distinction in the procedures used to import them into BMC Helix Continuous Optimization:

• Microscopic events are imported and measured as common metrics; the number of daily tickets by ticket type, the number of daily application errors by error code, and so on.
• Macroscopic events are imported (manually or automatically) with details of the single event in a separate structure

Event classification

It is possible to make a distinction between two kinds of macroscopic events, based on the predictability of the event itself.

• planned:
  • Maintenance: Maintenance activities such as backup operations or database cleaning
  • Change: Activities such as hardware or software upgrades
  • Generic: Other activities such as tests
• not planned:
  • Incident: A cause of abnormal behavior such as link failure, database shutdown, and so on.
  • Error: An effect that has been observed such as connection failure
  • Problem: An undesirable behavior that is continuously observed over time, such as high response time or poor end-to-end performance

The following graphic shows the event classification along with it's examples in brackets:

The following topics explain how to work with macroscopic events:

• Managing events
• Viewing events

User roles for event management

Event management options are also available to non-administrative users, in the Workspace section. For a non-administrative user to be able to edit events, the user account must be allowed to perform the following activities (through user roles):

• WEB_EVENTS to be able to display events
• WEB_EVENTS_EDIT to be able to manage events

For information about the permissions related to events, see Default user roles and permissions.