BMC TM ART Integration to CMDB – Automated CI Publisher recommendation

A direct integration is available between BMC TM ART and CMDB. This integration is called the BMC TM ART CI Publisher. Depending on configuration, the CI Publisher creates various CIs and relationships between these CIs. After setting up the integration, whenever BMC TM ART generates an event, it includes the related CI information as part of the event sent to event management.

The most recent version of the BMC TM ART CI Publisher has the following relation configuration options:

Note that option 15 is for publishing transactions using only the BMC_Transaction class instead of the base BMC_Activity class that BMC_Transaction is derived from. This relation option is supported from BMC Atrium CMDB 7.5 or later (when the BMC_Transaction class was first introduced).

Beyond the regular use case of publishing transactions to a local cell, the following key use case is now also supported:

1. BMC TM ART Transaction is published by the CI Publisher to a CMDB integrated with a remote cell (not a BMC ProactiveNet cell)
2. BMC TM ART Adapter brings response data into BMC ProactiveNet.
3. BMC ProactiveNet events are forwarded to the remote cell, where Service Impact Management is implemented.
4. Service models are manually updated to reference the BMC_Transaction CIs published by the BMC TM ART CI Publisher.

To enable this use case, enhancements are required for several components:

• Patch TM ART Adapter discovered transaction CI aliases to match the Aliases format published via TM ART CI Publisher (QM001721506)
• Patch BMC ProactiveNet to reference the BMC TM ART transaction CI (QM001721506)
• Patch the BMC ProactiveNet cell rule to avoid resetting the alias when an event is forwarded to a remote cell (QM001731450).

The naming conventions and relationships assumed by BMC TM ART and BMC ProactiveNet for events generated by BMC TM ART and published CIs are the following:

Recommendations for BMC TM ART and the CMDB Pulisher

If you have already integrated BMC ProactiveNet with BMC TM ART, you may not be interested in the additional integration of BMC TM ART with BMC Atrium CMDB. This might be due to any of the following reasons:

• Many of the default CI types and relationships that this integration automatically publishes no longer match current CMDB best practices.
• You may want only a subset of BMC TM ART objects published into the service model.

For such situations, it is recommended that you not integrate BMC TM ART directly into the CMDB via the BMC TM ART CI Publisher. Instead, leverage the BMC ProactiveNet Adapter for BMC TM ART to bring BMC TM ART data into BMC ProactiveNet. This enables you to manually create service models and then use the default BMC ProactiveNet integration and workflows for CMDB CI association, event generation, and impact analysis.

For those scenarios where BMC TM ART must generate events and therefore provide CI context in the events, it is recommended to only publish BMC_Transaction CIs using option 15. This allows any new BMC_Transaction CI related to a BMC TM ART monitor to automatically appear in the CMDB. You can then relate the BMC_Transaction to service models in any way that is relevant to your environment.