BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer architecture

The BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer application functions on the basis of process inheritance. A process within a BMC Remedy ITSM application inherits workflow rules from a process template that was designed by using BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer. When you raise a new ticket or request in a BMC Remedy ITSM application, you can select (or a system can automatically select) a process template. The process template is selected depending on the category, type, and item fields, of the request, or any other field combinations that you define. BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer uses a user interface based on Java Swing as the graphical tool for designing and deploying processes. You launch the Java graphical tool from a browser by using Java Web Start technology.

After you associate the process with the request, the BMC Remedy Action Request System (BMC Remedy AR System) Java API generates a set of tasks, dependencies, service level agreement targets, actions, and related fields validation for that request. The tasks are assigned to the business groups based on the information stored within the process definition. The task name, type, category, description, and assignee are copied from each process template task to the corresponding task record in the BMC Remedy ITSM applications.

After a process template is deployed, it is stored in different BMC Remedy AR System forms, including TMS:Task, as configuration data. To execute its process steps, BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer uses the filter API plug-in.

A process must be set to a status of Live before it can be used for a BMC Remedy request. The process name must also be mapped to the type of request. The BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer integration into the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite provides this ability by using either the service request definition (SRD) for service requests or by using the BMC Remedy ITSM Process Mapping form for BMC Remedy ITSM requests.

At run-time, and after the process is invoked, the filter plugin known as Abydos Remedy Integration Daemon (ARID) works as a workflow engine to control the execution of the processes. The workflow engine uses a thread pool to concurrently execute different processes. When an end-user creates a request for which a mapping has been defined, the ARID filter plugin creates an instance of the Live process against that request. The ARID plugin then manages the progression of the process instance, including any actions that are defined with it.

The following diagram shows the components involved in deploying BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer in the BMC Remedy OnDemand 2013.01 environment.

BMC Remedy OnDemand deployment

For BMC Remedy OnDemand, BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer communicates with the DVM plugin by using XML over HTTP to run create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on the BMC Remedy AR System server. The DVM then communicates with the BMC Remedy AR System server by using the BMC Remedy AR System Java API.

When the BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer client is installed on premise and is not provided through BMC Remedy OnDemand, it communicates with the BMC Remedy AR System server by using the BMC Remedy AR System Java API.

End-users can see the progression of the process instance for their request through the Process Tracker servlet, which displays the process with each task color-coded to indicate the individual status.

BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer is tightly integrated with the BMC Remedy ITSM and BMC Service Request Management applications to execute the back-end run-time processes. To enable the invocation of the BMC Remedy ITSM Process Designer back-end run-time processes, BMC Remedy Process Designer workflows and UI components are added to the BMC Remedy ITSM and BMC Service Request Management forms.