Orientation

Quick overview

Organizations are rapidly moving their businesses to the cloud, and this adoption provides some challenges along with the advantages. BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables organizations to ease some challenges related to working in a multi-cloud, multi-provider environment. 

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker is an add-on offering for Remedy IT Service Management Suite (Remedy ITSM Suite) and BMC Helix ITSM that provides the following features:

• Collaborated, automated, incident brokering to enable organizations to address some service management challenges they encounter when using services from multiple cloud providers
• DevOps Integration features to enable DevOps teams to integrate their agile development tools for effortless collaboration between development and operations teams
• Cloud Service Dashboard to enable cloud owners to review the performance and status of cloud-service providers to make necessary decisions for the smooth functioning of all cloud services.
• Tailoring options to enable developers to create end-to-end connector flows for service providers or applications not provided out of the box.

Out-of-the-box connectors and flows developed by using next-generation technology enables BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker to connect:

• On Premises or OnDemand ITSM applications to third-party ticketing applications for automated ticket brokering. 
• 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. 

The following image shows how BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker connects ITSM applications with third-party applications and services:

ITSM and Smart IT compatibility

The following table describes the versions of ITSM and Smart IT that are required with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker for a supported feature:

Smart IT version	ITSM feature
	Incident Management	Change Management	Problem Management	Work Order	Vendor link URL	Attachment (Service Cloud and Jira only)	Vendor author information to Smart IT	Smart IT author information to Vendor	Multiple instances of Vendor
Smart IT 2.0 Patch 1 Hot Fix 7			(UC only)	(UC only)
Smart IT 2.0 Patch 1
1902+
1808 Patch 1
1808
1805

Product roles

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker primarily aims at simplifying tasks for the following roles:

Product features

Key features of BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker include:

Collaborated, automated, incident brokering

The Incident Brokering feature enables organizations to manage multiple service desk management issues when working in a hybrid IT environment with a multi-cloud, multi-provider setup, organizations face multiple issues.

Organizations can:

• 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. The Incident Brokering feature provides predefined conditions that directs issues created by users to the appropriate technology provider. By using the out-of-the-box connectors and flows, ticket data is sent to the technology provider, and relevant data is updated on the Smart IT user interface.
• Sync issue data between Smart IT and cloud service provider service desk — When Service Desk agents create the user issue with the service provider support and need to manually collaborate with them to track progress of the tickets. Even with email updates, visibility on the progress of tickets is limited, especially to users raising the issue. Issue information from both users and technology providers is updated at both ends, so both parties have visibility into the progress of issue. It also highlights needed information so users and technology providers can take required action.
• Track ticket resolution data for performance evaluation — 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. 

Out-of-the-box incident brokering flows are available for:

• Amazon Web Services 
• Service Cloud for Salesforce
• Other instances of ITSM

For more information about incident brokering with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, see Incident brokering.

For more information about the configuration, see Configuring BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management.

Ticket consolidation 

The ticket consolidation feature helps get better service from your 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

When organizations utilize services from multiple vendors, tracking incidents across multiple ticket management systems can be a challenge. BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker facilitates the consolidation of vendor tickets into ITSM. 

When an incident is created in the cloud service provider's ticketing system, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker creates a corresponding ticket in ITSM. BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker ensures that the notes and the status of the incident as well as the vendor ticket remain updated. The Smart IT console displays the vendor ticket ID as a link that opens the ticket in the vendor ticket management system.

Out-of-the-box ticket consolidation flows are available for:

• Salesforce Service Cloud
• Jira Service Desk
• Multiple instances of ITSM

DevOps integration

Many organizations are moving to the DevOps model for faster, and more efficient releases. DevOps teams can use the tools provided by BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker to go beyond IT Service Management and extend these capabilities into the DevOps operations. 

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 organizations 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 provides out-of-the-box flows to integrate multiple agile development tools like Jira, CA Agile Central, Azure DevOps with Smart IT. The flows provided enable:

• Automatic creation of a change, incident, or work order records for an issue. Additionally, users can also manually associate multiple issues to a single change request. The issue and ITSM request are linked, and Smart IT users can view status of all the requests or tickets from a single console. 
• Automatic creation of issues when a change, incident, problem, or work order is created in Smart IT.

For more information about the DevOps integration, see DevOps integration.

For more information about the required configuration, see Configuring BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management.

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.

For more information, see Tracking the quality of cloud services by using the BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management Service 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 ITSM.  

For Azure Monitor, the following features are supported:

• Incidents are created in ITSM based on Azure alerts.
• Azure alerts status is updated based on updates to ITSM incident status.
• Azure alerts or events information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.

For TrueSight Operations Management, the following features are supported:

• Incidents are created in ITSM based on TrueSight Operations Management events.
• Event status is updated based on updates to ITSM incident status.
• Event information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.

For more information about integration with Azure Monitor, see Enabling prebuilt integration with Azure Monitor.

For more information about integration with TrueSight Operations Management, see Enabling prebuilt integration with TrueSight Operations Management.

Security

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

Currently the following features are supported:

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

For more information about integration with QRadar SIEM, see Enabling prebuilt integration with IBM QRadar.

Tailoring out-of-the-box flows

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. 

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

Product documentation

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