22.4 enhancements and patches

Review the  BMC Helix Operations Management enhancements and patches for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users.

Version	SaaS	On premises	Updates and enhancement
22.4.02			22.4.02 enhancements
22.4.01			22.4.01 enhancements
22.4.00			22.4.00 enhancements

BMC applies upgrades as described in BMC Helix Upgrade policy . BMC applies upgrades and patches during Maintenance windows .

22.4.02

Specify local variables in advanced enrichment policies

In the If action of an advanced enrichment policy, specify local variables after the event slot operator. Previously, you could specify local variables only before the event slot operator.

For more information, see Actions for advanced and time-based enrichment.

Change an event class without deleting event policy configurations

In an event policy, change the event class in the event selection criteria without deleting the event policy configurations.

For more information, see Creating and enabling event policies.

View consolidated insights summary

The Insights tab shows a consolidated summary of trend, behavior, and daily average for health score, events, and incidents associated with a service.

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

View CIs of same kind as a group node in the topology map

In the CI Topology tab, if you have 10 or more CIs of the same kind, they are grouped together to appear as a group node in the topology map. You can expand each CI in the group to view additional CIs.

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

Advanced filters for viewing Situations

Advanced filters are available on the Situations page to filter and view Situations based on the status, severity, priority, and type. By default, open Situations are displayed with severity levels of Critical, Major, Minor, Warning, and Information. You can also use the time period filter to view Situations for a specific time period. By default, Situations for the last 24 hours are displayed. 

For more information, see Monitoring policy-based situations. 

REST API for deleting event slots in a custom class

Use the PATCH/events/classes endpoint to delete event slots for a custom class.

For more information, see Event management endpoints in the REST API.

REST API for running PSL commands on multiple PATROL Agents

Use the agent_operations REST API endpoint to run PSL commands on multiple PATROL Agents simultaneously. 

For more information, see Agent Query Tool PATROL Script Language command management endpoints in the REST API.

22.4.01

Discover insights for incidents from services

Improvements in Service Insights enable operators to:

• View the insights summary and graph for incidents in terms of daily average for the last 15 days and the percentage increase in incidents. You can use the summary and graph to take corrective measures and improve the service health.
• View the highlighted region on the trend graph to quickly identify the dates on which the health score decreased or incidents, major and critical events increased recently.

For more information, see Performing probable cause analysis.

View child services associated with a parent service

On the heatmap view of the Services page, child services are displayed with the associated parent service. This helps in understanding the relationship between various services in your organization. Click any of the child services to view the next level of child services for the service.  

For more information, see Monitoring services.

22.4.00

Associate specific node kinds to an event

Quickly identify impacted devices or services by associating specific node kinds from BMC Discovery to an event in BMC Helix Operations Management . 

For more information, see Event enrichment for adding context.

Use event processing limits to improve event performance

Event processing limits improve the performance and avoid event lags. A default maximum event processing limit is set for the following items:

• _repeat_count slot. For more information, see Event base event class.
• Lookup action. For more information, see Actions for advanced and time-based enrichment.

If your use case requires the event lookup to fetch more than 5000 entries or the repeat count exceeds 1000 entries, contact BMC Support to set a higher event processing limit.

Trigger event processing on change in event slot values of different types

In an advanced enrichment policy, use the Trigger-If function to trigger event processing when an event slot value of the String or Integer data type changes. Previously, event processing would be triggered only when the event slot values of the Enum data type changed.

For more information, see Actions for advanced and time-based enrichment.

Delete events on demand basis

Delete events on the Events page from the BMC Helix Operations Management  console or by using REST APIs to clean up closed events in your system. This eliminates the need to wait for the event pruning cycle to perform the event cleanup.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Performing event operations
• Event management endpoints in the REST API

Capture incident details in a new event slot

Use the incident_sysid event slot to capture details of the incident.

For more information, see Event base event class.

Change in lookup slot for the event base class

Use the source_hostname slot to look up topology information in BMC Discovery . You can no longer use the source_address slot to look up topology information. 

For more information, see the following topics:

• Slot facets
• Event base event class

Reduce noise from the events received from BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations

Events from third-party sources are deduplicated and suppressed for reducing noise through the following new policies defined in BMC Helix Operations Management:

• Drop Duplicate Events - BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations 
• Update Old Events - BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations
• Update AWS CloudWatch Events - BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations
• Update Azure Events - BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations
• Update IBM Netcool Events - BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations

For information about these policies, see Out-of-the-box event policies and templates.

View alarms for PATROL Agents

The BMC PATROL Agent Health out-of-the-box alarm policy sends alarms for a PATROL Agent that reports no collection of data within a specific duration.

For more information, see Alarm policies.

View Service Insights for events

Service Insights is now improved to show the trend graphs of Major and Critical events for a specified period. Operators can view and analyze the graph and impact summary of Major and Critical events associated with the impacted service. The impact summary text panels show the highest percentage increase for the last 24 hours and daily average of events for the last 15 days. Use these insights to take corrective measures.

For more information, see Performing probable cause analysis.

Probable cause isolation enhancements

This section describes the enhancements available when performing root cause isolation for the impacted services and Situations. 

View Situations in the Impacting Events panel

The Situations created from an impacted service are listed in a separate tab on the Impacting Events panel. This is to show the difference between the impacting events and Situations created from those events.

For more information, see Performing probable cause analysis.

View metrics with their display names in the Performance View graph

In the Event Details > Performance View tab, the Object Class name for events is replaced with the display name of the metric or attribute along with the unit of measurement.

For more information, see Performing probable cause analysis.

Service health indicator improvements

When defining service health indicators, you can select metrics for a CI Kind by choosing a CI Name. This helps in identifying the device host name when creating the alarm policy for the metrics. For example, the following figure shows how to select the metrics for the Cluster CI Kind.

For more information, see Modeling services.

Updates to the REST API topic titles in the documentation

The REST API topic titles in the BMC Helix Operations Management documentation space are updated as shown in the following image: