Overview of the Blackout Policy solution

For planned infrastructure maintenance activities, organizations might want to implement a blackout period. In a blackout period, actions available for incoming events in an event management solution can be limited or restricted for a specified time period.

In BMC Helix Operations Management, blackout policies are created to handle events, and incoming events have the status as Blackout. After the blackout period is over, administrators disable or delete the policy to ensure that unused policies are not retained. Typically, before starting a blackout period, a change request is created in a change management system. After the change is completed, the blackout period is over.

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation offers a solution that automatically creates blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management based on a change request in BMC Helix ITSM. By using the automated solution, administrators can save time and effort required to manually create and maintain blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management.

Overview

When a change request with one or more configuration items (CIs) is in a Scheduled state in BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation creates a blackout policy that includes the CI details in BMC Helix Operations Management. All events generated on the associated CIs are ignored, and you cannot perform any operations on events that are blacked out until the blackout period expires.

Before implementing the blackout policy solution, learn more about the solution:

A single blackout policy is created for a single change request. A change request can contain multiple CIs.
A blackout policy is created only when the change request is in a Scheduled status.
If a change request is updated for associating CIs or if the scheduled start or end date changes before the scheduled blackout period, the policy also gets updated.
When the change request is marked as Complete, Cancelled, or Pending, even if the blackout period has not expired, the blackout policy gets deleted in BMC Helix Operations Management.
After the change request is complete and marked as Closed, no more automation policies are triggered.

Video

The following video created by the BMC Customer Support team (4:52) gives an overview, demonstrates the steps to configure the solution, and walks you through the use case flow:

icon_play (1).png Watch the YouTube video created by BMC Customer Support about How to configure Blackout Policy Solution

Products involved

The following table provides information about the products involved and the role of each product.

Product	Role
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation	Automates creating, updating, and deleting blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management based on a change request scheduled in BMC Helix ITSM.
BMC Helix Operations Management	Suppresses events for a scheduled maintenance window by using the blackout policies that are enabled based on a scheduled change request.
BMC Helix ITSM	Supported change management system.

For more information about the supported versions of each of the products, see System-requirements.

Where to go from here

Configuring-the-blackout-policy-solution