Overview of the Blackout Policy solution

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

In BMC Helix Operations Management, blackout policies are created to handle events with the status as Blackout. After the blackout period, administrators disable or delete the policy to make sure that unused policies are not retained. Typically, a change request is created in a change management system before starting a blackout period. After the change request is complete, the blackout period expires.

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation offers a solution that automatically creates blackout policies based on a change request created in BMC Helix ITSM. By using the automated solution, administrators can save the 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 behavior:

A single blackout policy gets created for a single change request. A change request can contain multiple configuration items (CIs).
A blackout policy is created only when the change request is in a Scheduled state.
If a change request is updated (additional CIs are associated or the scheduled start or end date changes before the scheduled blackout period) the blackout policy is updated.
When the change request is marked as Complete, Cancelled, or Pending, even if the blackout period has not expired, the blackout policy is disabled and deleted in BMC Helix Operations Management.
No automation policies are run after the change request is complete and marked as Closed.
When a blackout policy is created, except Configuration Item, all other request types (Incident, Infrastructure Change, and so on) are excluded.

Based on the CI Relation Type specified in the change request, CIs can be excluded from the blackout policy. While configuring the solution, you can select the relation type, and the CIs get excluded based on the relation type.
We recommend you do not make any changes to the default values for the timezone in the configuration mappings. This ensures that when the change request is created, the blackout policy is created based on the UTC standard timezones specified in the solution configuration.

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 scheduled change request in BMC Helix ITSM.
BMC Helix Operations Management	Suppresses events for a scheduled maintenance window by using the blackout policies enabled based on a scheduled change request.
BMC Helix ITSM	Supported change management system.

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

Where to go from here

Configuring-the-blackout-policy-solution