Enabling the solution for blackout policies

For planned infrastructure maintenance activities, organizations might want to implement a blackout period. In a blackout period, actions available for incoming events in an event management solution can be limited or restricted for a specified time period.

In BMC Helix Operations Management, blackout policies are created to handle the events, and incoming events have the status as Blackout. After the blackout period is over, administrators disable or delete the policy to ensure that unused policies are not retained. Typically, before starting a blackout period, a change request is created in a change management system. After the change is completed, the blackout period is over. 

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation offers a solution that automatically creates blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management based on a change request in BMC Helix ITSM. By using the automated solution, administrators can save time and effort required to manually create and maintain blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management. 

Overview

When a change request with one or more CIs is created in BMC Helix ITSM and is in a Scheduled state, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation creates a blackout policy with the CI details in BMC Helix Operations Management. All events generated on the associated CIs are ignored, and you cannot perform any operations on events that are blacked out, until the blackout period expires. 

Before implementing the blackout policy solution, learn more about the solution: 

• A single blackout policy is created for a single change request with CIs. A change request can contain multiple CIs. 
• A blackout policy is created only when the change request is in a Scheduled state. The policy gets deleted if the change request status changes to any other state such as Pending or Cancelled. 
• When the change request is marked as Complete,  Cancelled, or Pending, the blackout policy gets deleted. 
• If a change request is updated for associating CIs or change in the scheduled start/end date before the scheduled blackout period, the policy also gets updated.
• If a change request is updated during the scheduled blackout period, the policy is not updated or deleted. 

Products involved

The following table provides information about the products involved and the role of each product. 

For more information about the supported versions of each of the product, see System requirements.

Where to go from here

To configure the solution, see Configuring the blackout policy solution.