Orientation

Quick overview

Organizations are rapidly moving their businesses to cloud environments and this adoption provides some challenges along with the advantages. BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker (formerly, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management) enables organizations to ease some challenges that they might face while working in a multi-cloud, multi-provider environment.

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker is an add-on offering for BMC Helix ITSM that provides the following benefits:

While using services from multiple cloud providers, organizations can consolidate issues at one place for ease of tracking, and resolve them efficiently.
Connect multiple agile development tools so that DevOps teams can work at their own pace using their own tools and still integrate into the overall IT change process.
Cloud service owners can review the performance and status of the cloud service providers and make necessary decisions for smooth functioning of all cloud services.
Developers can tailor the functionalities to integrate with service providers or applications that are not provided out-of-the-box.
Connect on premises or OnDemand BMC Helix ITSM applications to third-party ticketing applications for automated ticket brokering.

Important

For the supported features to work successfully, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker 21.3 version requires BMC Helix ITSM 21.3 version.

Product features

Collaborated and automated incident brokering

The incident brokering feature enables organizations to manage multiple service desk management issues when working in an IT environment with a multi-cloud, multi-provider setup.

With this feature, organizations can perform the following actions that resolves the issues:

Action	Issue solved	How the issue is solved
Redirect user issues to the appropriate technology provider	With multiple service providers with varied systems, integration points, and approaches to managing custom issues, user interaction can be inefficient.	This feature provides predefined conditions that directs issues to the appropriate technology provider. The ticket data is sent to the technology provider, and relevant data is updated on the BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT user interface.
Synchronize issue data between BMC Helix ITSM and cloud service provider service desk	When service desk agents create issues with the service provider support, the agents need to manually collaborate with them to track the progress of the tickets. Even with email updates, visibility on the ticket progress is limited, especially to users raising the issue.	With BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, issue information is shared and updated with both, agents and users. This ensures that agents and users have visibility into the ticket progress.
Track ticket resolution data for performance evaluation	With multiple service providers, the amount of ticket data can be vast and might possess challenge in managing the data.	The issue information available from the service providers can be used to track SLA targets and the service resolution efficiency. This information enables organizations to review the data to make educated decisions about future engagement with the service provider.

Learn more about incident brokering with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker in Incident brokering.

Ticket consolidation

The ticket consolidation feature helps organizations to get better service from their multi-cloud service providers. Using the ticket consolidation feature, you can:

manage tickets across multiple cloud providers in one integrated service desk
directly collaborate with multi-cloud providers to efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues
proactively inform employees of planned service outages via federated calendar

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker lets you consolidate various third-party application tickets into BMC Helix ITSM. When a ticket is created in a third-party application, a corresponding BMC Helix ITSM ticket is also created. You can easily synchronize the data and comment updates between the two tickets. The Smart IT console displays the third-party application ticket ID as a link that opens the ticket in the third-party ticket management system.

Learn more about ticket consolidation in Consolidation of tickets from third-party applications into BMC Helix ITSM.

DevOps integration

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables DevOps and IT Management teams to work seamlessly, giving developers the flexibility to use their own tools and still integrate into the overall change process and governance that the IT organization mandates. If an organization uses multiple instances of Atlassian JIRA Software, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables the organization to integrate these multiple instances of Jira with a single instance of Smart IT to manage tickets for all the instances.

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables organizations to integrate multiple agile development tools like Jira, Rally Software (formerly known as CA Agile Central), Azure DevOps with BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT.

Learn more about this feature in DevOps integration.

Cloud service dashboard

The Service Dashboard provided with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables organizations to track response and resolution time for multiple service providers. It includes information about how many incidents were raised for a given time period, what was the response time for the incidents, and how many were resolved within the defined SLA.

Additionally, the dashboard provides real-time details about the selected service providers, including the current availability of the service.

Organizations can manage and track data for multiple service providers and use the data to review the quality of their services and analyze the performance. This information can help the organizations make the decisions of the effectiveness of the Service Provider.

Learn more about the service dashboard in Tracking the quality of cloud services by using the BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker Dashboard.

ITOM integration for cloud monitoring

Pre-built integration with Microsoft Azure and TrueSight Operations Management enables you to monitor your network resources and automatically create incidents in BMC Helix ITSM.

The following table lists the features that are provided for Azure Monitor and TrueSight Operations Management:

Feature	Azure Monitor	TrueSight Operations Management
Incident creation	Incidents are created in BMC Helix ITSM from Azure alerts.	An incident is created in BMC Helix ITSM from a TrueSight Operations Management event.
Status updates	The status of an Azure alert is updated when a BMC Helix ITSM incident status is updated.	The status of an event is updated when a BMC Helix ITSM incident status is updated.
Display information	Azure alerts or events information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.	Event information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.

Learn more about the integration with Azure Monitor in the following documentation:

Learn more about the integration with TrueSight Operations Management in Creating incidents from TrueSight Operations Management events via BMC Helix Integration Service.

Security

Pre-built integration IBM QRadar Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) enables you to automatically create incidents in BMC Helix ITSM whenever a security offense is generated in IBM QRadar SIEM.

Currently, the following features are supported:

Incidents are created in BMC Helix ITSM based on QRadar SIEM offenses.
Offense status is updated based on updates to BMC Helix ITSM incident status.
Activity note sharing between QRadar offenses and incidents.
Offense information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.

Learn more about the integration with QRadar SIEM in the following documentation:

Tailoring out-of-the-box flows

While using BMC Helix Integration Service, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker provides Incident brokering and Change configuration flows out-of-the-box. By using the user interface driven configuration screens users can tailor complete process flows according to their business requirements.

Learn more about configuring the out-of-the-box connectors in Deploying custom flows, updated vendor mappings, and connector processes to production environments.

Comparison of features supported by integration technologies

The following table lists the available integration features and the support BMC Helix iPaaS, BMC Helix iPaaS, powered by MuleSoft, and BMC Helix Integration Service provides for these features:

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Important

The go-forward scope for BMC Helix Integration Service will be limited to BMC-to-BMC centric integration use cases.

To learn more about the scope of this product, see Product announcements.

Third-party application name	Type of integration	BMC Helix iPaaS, powered by Jitterbit	BMC Helix iPaaS, powered by MuleSoft	*BMC Helix Integration Service
AppDynamics	Monitoring
Atlassian Jira Software	DevOps
AWS Support	Incident brokering
BMC Helix Remedyforce	Incident brokering Ticket consolidation
BMC Truesight Operations Management	Monitoring
IBM QRadar	Security
Jira Service Management	DevOps
Microsoft Azure DevOps	DevOps
Microsoft Azure Monitor	Monitoring
Multiple instances of BMC Helix ITSM	Incident brokering Ticket consolidation
Rally Software (formerly known as CA Agile Central)	DevOps
Salesforce Service Cloud	Incident brokering Ticket consolidation
ServiceNow ITSM	Incident brokering
Splunk	Monitoring
xMatters	Monitoring

Product roles

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker aims to simplify the tasks for the following user roles:

Role	Responsibility
BMC Helix ITSM user roles
Service desk agent	Create incident and problem tickets for services by using BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT.
Change manager	Create and manage change requests by using BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT.
Work order manager	Create and manage work order by using BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT.
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker user roles
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker administrator	Use out of the box integration templates or flows to run an integration. When using BMC Helix Integration Service, an administrator can also create their own flows.
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker service owner	View service levels for service providers and monitor the ticket status for multiple service providers.
Developer	When using BMC Helix Integration Service, a developer can create custom connectors and flows for services that are not provided out of the box.

Product documentation

The BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker documentation helps users implement or use this product.

Goal	Reference
Where do I begin?	Getting started
How do I achieve value with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker?	Use cases
How do I start setting up BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker?	Performing preconfiguration tasks
Where do I find information about configuring the product?	Configuring BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker
Where do I find information about resolving issues related to the product?	Troubleshooting
How do I access self-help within the product?	The following video (2:47) provides an overview of accessing the self-help within BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker: &lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt; https://www.youtube.com/embed/xnJES8-CwkQ