Proactive Service Resolution for automatic incident management with BMC Helix Integration Service

Proactive Service Resolution (PSR) is an end-to-end solution that enables you to establish connections across multiple applications to execute integration cases. The automated integration bridges the gap between operations and service desks and enables you to proactively manage the IT infrastructure risks that can impact the performance of your applications or services.

By establishing PSR, you can integrate event management with incident management and convert infrastructure events into related infrastructure incidents with reduced human effort. Your organization benefits by achieving higher availability of your applications and key business services through near real-time collaboration between operations and the service desk. 

BMC Helix Integration Service provides an automated environment and out-of-the-box tools for establishing PSR. 


Products involved in PSR for automatic incident management

The following table provides information about the products involved in PSR, the role of each product, and the minimum product versions that are required for setting up PSR.

ProductRoleMinimum product version required
TrueSight Operations ManagementMonitors the performance and availability of the applications and services in the IT infrastructure.11.3.03
BMC Helix Operations ManagementCloud variant of TrueSight Operations Management. Monitors the performance and availability of the applications and services in the IT infrastructure.20.02.00

BMC Helix ITSM / CMDB


BMC Helix ITSM automates the processes around the IT service desk, asset management, and change management operations.

BMC CMDB stores and manages the configuration items (CIs) that represent the IT environment. 

19.11.00
BMC DiscoveryAutomatically discovers data center inventory and configuration and relationship data. Maps applications to the IT infrastructure.11.2
TrueSight OrchestrationPerforms predefined triage actions on impacted CIs to remediate the IT infrastructure issues.

Platform 8.2

Content 20.19.02

BMC Helix Integration ServiceProvides out-of-the box tools to automatically execute integration cases.19.11.00

Tip

For more information about interactions between the involved products and the end-to-end solution use case, see Use case: Automatic incident management.

Deployment scenarios

BMC Helix Integration Service supports PSR integration with on-premises instances of the involved applications that communicate via the BMC Helix Integration Service cloud. The following deployment scenarios are supported:

  • BMC Helix ITSM in the cloud, BMC Discovery and TrueSight Operations Management on-premises
  • BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Discovery in the cloud, TrueSight Operations Management on-premises
  • BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Operations Management in the cloud, BMC Discovery on-premises
  • BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Operations Management, and BMC Discovery in the cloud

You can establish a connection between your on-premises application and the BMC Helix Integration Service cloud by using Integration Controller. For more information about setting up the integration, see Setting up Proactive Service Resolution to enable automatic incident management.

Service resolution levels in PSR

Proactive Service Resolution optimizes the way event-generation and incident-creation processes operate together to manage your IT. Depending on the maturity of the event-monitoring system in your IT environment, PSR can operate at different levels. At each level, different incidents are created.

  • Level 1 (L1): Event-based service resolution
    With event-based service resolution, for every event reported by a BMC event-management product, an incident is created. Even if the event-management product is not using CMDB, or not leveraging the correlation engine to associate an event with a Configuration Item (CI), an incident is created by using the event information. 

    Products required for L1

    • BMC Helix Integration Service
    • TrueSight Operations Management / Helix Operations Management
    • BMC Helix ITSM


  • Level 2 (L2): Infrastructure-based service resolution
    With infrastructure-based service resolution, for every event reported by a BMC event-management product, an incident is created by using the event and Causal CI information.

    Products required for L2

    • BMC Helix Integration Service
    • TrueSight Operations Management / Helix Operations Management
    • BMC Helix ITSM / CMDB
    • BMC Discovery
  • Level 3 (L3): Infrastructure-based service resolution
    With infrastructure-based service resolution, for every event reported by a BMC event-management product, an incident is created by using the event, Causal CI information, and impacted areas.

    Products required for L3

    • BMC Helix Integration Service
    • Helix Operations Management
    • BMC Helix ITSM / CMDB
    • BMC Discovery
  • Triage and remediation (T&R)
    The triage and remediation use case enables you to take the remediation actions for events and automate the remediation processes.

    Products required for T&R

    • BMC Helix Integration Service
    • TrueSight Operations Management / Helix Operations Management
    • BMC Helix ITSM / CMDB
    • BMC Discovery
    • TrueSight Orchestration

The following solution level matrix identifies the capabilities provided by the PSR solution at each of the service resolution levels:

CapabilityL1L2L3T&R
Event management++++
Incident management++++

Automated integration via BMC Helix Integration Service

++++
Event correlation
+++
Automated discovery
+++
Automated remediation


+

Best practice

You can start using PSR in your organization by getting connected at the event level and then expand to the infrastructure level, where you take the organization CIs into consideration. There is an evolution that needs to occur to make sure that the required components at each level are functioning for their respective areas. As your organization matures, you can expand the coverage of event types and enrich the content and context of the incidents generated for these events.

  • Level 1 is a good point to start Proactive Service Resolution—even if you are already doing some service resolution at a basic level.
    The duration of your stay at this level entirely depends on the maturity and capability of your organization. At this level, the communication channel between event monitoring and incident management gets established, which ensures that when an event occurs, an incident is created for that event.
  • After Level 1 is established, you can then easily and readily move to Level 2 by defining CIs or making the defined CIs available to your event correlation system. Level 2 is to enhance the incidents with better and richer content.

Connectors for establishing PSR

BMC Helix Integration Service provides the following out-of-the-box connectors that are designed for executing PSR integration cases:

  • TrueSight Ops Mgmt for PSR
  • Helix Ops Mgmt for PSR
  • ITSM for PSR

Depending on your deployment scenario, use the connectors as follows:

  • To connect to an on-premises instance of TrueSight Operations Management, use the TrueSight Ops Mgmt for PSR connector.
  • To connect to a cloud instance of TrueSight Operations Management (BMC Helix Operations Management), use the Helix Ops Mgmt for PSR connector.
  • To connect to BMC Helix ITSM, use the ITSM for PSR connector.

By using these connectors, you can design flows that automatically perform predefined tasks across applications and convert infrastructure events into related infrastructure incidents, without human intervention. For more information about triggers and actions available in each connector, see Out-of-the-box connectors.

Important considerations for BMC Service Resolution users

If you use BMC Service Resolution (BSR) and want to start using Proactive Service Resolution (PSR) instead, consider the following information while planning the PSR integration. The automated migration of the configuration in BSR is currently not supported; to establish PSR, you must perform the following manual steps:

  • Re-create the required mappings in BMC Helix Integration Service. The PSR solution replaces the need for compiling the defaultmapping.map file. In BMC Helix Integration Service, you can use the out-of-the-box catalog flows that include the default mappings; you can also customize the mappings as required in Flow Designer. For more information, see Setting up Proactive Service Resolution to enable automatic incident management
  • If you have applied any modifications to the propagation policy for creating incidents, you must migrate the same criteria configuration to the Operations Management notification policy configuration. The event selection criteria is still controlled on the TrueSight Operations Management/ Helix Operations Management side with a propagation policy. 

Where to go from here

Setting up Proactive Service Resolution to enable automatic incident management

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