Product overview
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation is an automation aggregator, which is available as part of the BMC Helix IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution. It helps organizations to identify automation opportunities and connect with automation tools to define policies that trigger remediation actions, ensuring no loss to service performance.
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation is built on a microservices-based architecture and is available as a SaaS service and a container-based on-premises deployment. You access BMC Helix Intelligent Automation from BMC Helix Portal, the launchpad for your licensed BMC Helix services. From BMC Helix Portal, you perform user management and tenant management functions.
Watch the following video (3:48) to understand the core capabilities of BMC Helix Intelligent Automation:
Watch the YouTube video for an overview of BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
Success story
| The story | Reference | |
|---|---|---|
The IT infrastructure team at a multinational IT solutions company improves MTTR by automating remediation actions for events. | One of the challenges the IT infrastructure team faced was managing unplanned service outages and performing recovery actions. Investigating and remediating the issues manually could take hours or even days. The IT team used BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to show automation actions in BMC Helix AIOps to eliminate the need for manual investigation, create incidents, and restart services. Automated remediation actions increased system reliability and improved the MTTR. | Remediating events automatically by using automation policies |
Product capabilities and features
The following diagram illustrates the key features and capabilities of the product at a glance:
Connect with the automation tool of your choice
As an automation broker, BMC Helix Intelligent Automation connects with multiple BMC or third-party automation tools to run automation workflows. To connect with any tool, you must use a connector. BMC Helix Intelligent Automation provides out-of-the-box connectors for various applications and includes a Generic REST API connector for connecting to any automation tool that supports REST API. Organizations can use their current tools while retaining the automation that they have developed and improved over time.
To learn more, see Connecting with automation tools.
Automate remediation through policies
After connecting with the desired automation tool, you create automation policies by using the workflows available in the tool. These policies can be triggered manually (from event monitoring solutions such as BMC Helix AIOps or BMC Helix Operations Management), or automatically. For example, 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 without manual intervention.
You can view a detailed history of each policy run, including all the details of the action, the status, and the actual output of the action in JSON format. This information provides clarity on where the exact error occurred, if any, and how it was resolved. You can filter the policy runs and bulk delete policy runs to manage the History page efficiently. You can reuse, copy, and clone policy definitions for similar applications elsewhere in the enterprise.
To learn more, see Managing automation policies.
Automate incident management and reduce incident noise
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 resolve the incident after the event is resolved.
The solution also provides incident noise reduction capability by creating a single incident automatically in BMC Helix ITSM for an ML-based situation in BMC Helix AIOps instead of creating multiple incidents for multiple qualifying events that form a situation.
To learn more, see Automating end-to-end processes with solutions.
Get insights into the time and cost saved by using automation
The Value Dashboard in BMC Helix Dashboards, which can be accessed from the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation console, offers insights into the number of successful and failed policy runs, the total number of unique policies, and the top 10 policies. Additionally, it displays the time and cost savings achieved by implementing these automation policies.
To learn more, see Viewing policies in BMC Helix Dashboards.
User roles
The following user roles are available out-of-the-box for BMC Helix Intelligent Automation. Users can perform tasks based on the assigned roles.
For more information, see Roles and permissions.
| User role | Description | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
Tenant Administrator | Users belonging to the Tenant Administrator role are responsible for configuring the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation solution for other users, configuring Proactive Service Resolution, and Blackout Policy solutions, and managing roles and permissions. Administrators can access all UI pages in the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation console. |
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Automation Engineer | Users belonging to the Automation Engineer role are responsible for performing day 1 activities such as configuring connectors to establish a connection with BMC or third-party automation tools, creating automation policies for remediating issues, and so on. Automation engineers can view the Solutions page, but cannot configure solutions. They can access all UI pages in the console. |
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Automation Developer | Users belonging to the Automation Developer role are responsible for creating automation policies to remediate issues and viewing their results on the History page. Automation developers can only access the following UI pages:
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Learn more
BMC Helix Intelligent Automation documentation helps new and experienced users implement and use this product.
Consult the following table to get started with the product based on your role:
| Role | Goals | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
| All users | Access and navigate the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation console, learn more about how the product helps you achieve your automation needs, and get answers to frequently asked questions. | |
| Tenant administrator | Configure Proactive Service Resolution and Blackout Policy solutions or manage users, roles, and permissions. | |
| Automation Engineer | Configure cloud or on-premises connectors to establish a connection with BMC or third-party automation tools. | |
| Automation Developer | Create automation policies for commonly occurring issues or based on automation requests sent from BMC Helix AIOps or BMC Helix Operations Management. | Managing automation policies |