BMC Helix Intelligent Automation overview

The following video (3:47) provides an overview of  BMC Helix Intelligent Automation:

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BMC Helix Intelligent Automation acts as an automation broker for connecting with BMC and third-party automation tools. 

It listens to the incoming events from various data sources, such as BMC Helix Operations Management and BMC Helix AIOps, and enables automation teams to quickly build automation policies to trigger remediation actions for the incoming events.

To track changes made to your infrastructure as part of the automation policies, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation also offers change management capability by integrating with BMC Helix ITSM.

Additionally, the product provides solutions to integrate with trouble ticket management systems and IT service management systems to automatically create TM Forum TMF621-compliant trouble tickets or incidents in the supported service management systems. 

The following diagram shows the sources of data (events) for BMC Helix Intelligent Automation and the automation tools supported by the product to remediate incoming events. 

Key benefits

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation provides the following benefits: 

• Available for both SaaS and containerized on-premises deployments.
• Modern, intuitive user interface that requires no prior programming experience, which generally results in an uncomplicated onboarding experience where users can start using the product right away. 
• Policy broker that connects to any BMC or third-party robust automation tools and framework to leverage existing automations available in your organization, thus saving the effort to re-create rules, workflows, and design processes for automation. 
• Simplified process for creating automation through policies to resolve time-consuming, manual, and repetitive remediation tasks for infrastructure-related events. 
• Choice to trigger automation manually or execute automatically with no manual intervention. 
• Tracking of remediation actions through automatic change request creation and approval in BMC Helix ITSM.
• Integration with TMF-compliant trouble ticket management systems to create TMF621-compliant trouble tickets automatically for incoming events. 
• Integration with BMC Helix ITSM to create incidents automatically for incoming events. 
• Consolidated report of the number of policies run and the time and cost saved by using automation available on the Value Dashboard in BMC Helix Dashboards. 

In general, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation helps you to reduce costs, increase speed, boost efficiency, improve productivity, reduce rollbacks, enable compliant processing and tracking, and allow skilled labor to be shifted to more strategic tasks. 

Product roles

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation provides default roles to simplify the tasks to be done by each product role. The following image shows the capabilities of each product role:

For more information, see Roles-and-permissions.

Product features

Key features of BMC Helix Intelligent Automation are described at a high-level.

Connectors for cloud and on-premises automation tools

To establish a connection with the supported automation tool, you must use the out-of-the-box connector. Cloud connectors are available for Amazon Web Services or BMC Helix Innovation Studio. For applications such as the Ansible Tower, Kubernetes, or TrueSight Orchestration, on-premises connectors are available. You configure on-premises connectors by using plugins, which are reusable, ensuring that you only need to perform the setup steps once. One of the key features of the product is a Generic REST API connector, which can be used to connect to any application that supports RESTful API. By using BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, one can take advantage and leverage existing automation tools used by an organization.   

On-demand request for automation

In BMC Helix AIOps (based on your license entitlement), users can send requests for creating automation policies for any selected event. Automation engineers get these requests and then create policies, which appear as automation actions in BMC Helix AIOps. Because the event details and trigger condition are included as artifacts in the request, creating a policy proves to be a fast, easy, and an automated way of providing remediation actions.  

Policy-based automation

Automation engineers create automation policies that contain one or more actions required to remediate an event. These policies can be triggered manually (from event monitoring solutions such as BMC Helix AIOps or BMC Helix Operations Management), or automatically. A classic example is that if a service is down on one of the servers in your environment, an event is generated in BMC Helix Operations Management, and if the automation policy exists, it triggers the service restart action and the service is started with no manual efforts.

A detailed history of each of the policy runs is displayed, which includes all the details of the action, the status, and the actual output of action in a JSON format. This provides clarity on where the exact error occurred, if any, and how it was resolved. Policy definitions can be reused, copied, and cloned for similar applications elsewhere in the enterprise.

Automated change integration with BMC Helix ITSM via policies

Remediation actions might involve making changes to the servers or systems in your organization. In such scenarios, organizations may already have a change management system implemented that plans, schedules, implements, and tracks changes made to the infrastructure. Currently, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation supports connecting with BMC Helix ITSM for all change management functions. Change management can be configured for individual policies, which then automatically create a request in BMC Helix ITSM. BMC Helix Intelligent Automation runs policies after the change is approved. As an automation engineer, you can see request status without having to access BMC Helix ITSM. 

Incident management through Proactive Service Resolution

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation provides an intelligent solution that integrates BMC Helix Operations Management with supported TMF-compliant trouble ticket management or IT Service Management systems to create tickets or incidents for events automatically. While standard requirements for a ticket or an incident are mapped out-of-the-box, the solution offers complete control to customize it to suit your organization's needs. Once implemented, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation automates the entire flow from creating an incident for an event, to sending information events in BMC Helix Operations Management to inform operators of the incident details, to resolving the incident after the event is resolved. 

Automated blackout policy management in BMC Helix Operations Management

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation provides a solution that integrates BMC Helix Operations Management with BMC Helix ITSM to create blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management based on a change request created in BMC Helix ITSM.  With the automated solution, administrators can save time and effort that would be required to manually create and maintain blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management.

Value Dashboard to get reports on time and save costs by automation

The BMC Helix Intelligent Automation Value Dashboard reports on the time and cost saved by using automation. It shows a snapshot of all policies executed by the product, successful versus failed policies, and the top 10 policies for the selected time period. This information helps in understanding the value of the product usage. You can easily create, export, and share interactive dashboards with users within or outside your environment.

Learn more

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation document helps new and experienced users implement and use this product. 

Use the links listed in the following table to quickly find information to get started working with the product according to your role: