Integrating with Microsoft SCOM

As a tenant administrator, it's important that you can monitor the connected systems and quickly identify and resolve any issues. The BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations Microsoft SCOM connector collects events, metrics, and topology data from Microsoft SCOM.

You can view the collected data in various BMC Helix application and derive the following benefits:

BMC Helix application	Type of data collected or viewed	Benefits
BMC Helix Operations Management	Events	Use a centralized event view to monitor and manage events, perform event operations, and filter events. Identify actionable events from a large volume of event data by processing events. For more information, see Monitoring events and reducing event noise.
BMC Helix Operations Management	Metrics	Detect anomalies and eliminate false positives. Use alarm and variate policies to detect anomalies through static and dynamic thresholds. For more information, see Detecting anomalies by using static and dynamic thresholds.
BMC Helix Discovery	Topology	Import all CIs from Microsoft SCOM in BMC Helix Discovery Visualize automatically created service models in BMC Helix Discovery For more information, see Managing your IT infrastructure.
BMC Helix AIOps	Situations (created from events)	Improve the mean time to resolve (MTTR) based on the situation-driven workflow Lower the mean time to detect or discover (MTTD) and the time required for investigating tickets. For more information, see Monitoring situations.
BMC Helix AIOps	Services (created from topology)	Perform root cause analysis of the impacted services. For more information, see Performing causal analysis of impacted services.

Supported versions

This connector supports the following versions of Microsoft SCOM for data collection:

2022
2019

Planning for the connection

Microsoft SCOM prerequisites

The database user that you plan to use for the connection is assigned the Operations Manager Read-Only Administrators role.

Note that BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations uses a non-TLS JDBC / JTDC call to connect to the Operations Manager database.

BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations prerequisites

Depending on the location (SaaS, on-premises) of the third-party product, choose one or more BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations deployment modes and review the corresponding port requirements. For information about various deployment modes and port requirements, see Deployment-scenarios.
Based on the deployment modes, use the BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations SaaS deployment or the BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations on-premises gateway or both. For more information about the gateway, see Deploying-the-BMC-Helix-Intelligent-Integrations-on-premises-gateway.

The on-premises gateway must be able to reach the third-party product on the required port (default is 1433).

In the preceding list, third-party product refers to Microsoft SCOM.

Configuring the connection with Microsoft SCOM

Access BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations:
- BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations SaaS – Log on to BMC Helix Portal, and click Launch on BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations.
- BMC Helix Intelligent Integrationson-premises gateway – Use one of the following URLs to access BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations:
  - http://<hostName>:<portNumber>/swpui
  - https://<hostName>:<portNumber>/swpui
On the CONNECTORS tab, click in the SOURCES panel.
Click the
Microsoft SCOM
tile.
Specify the source connection details:
1. Specify a unique instance name.
  Best practice
  We recommend that you specify the instance name in the following format:
  <sourceType>_<sourceControllerServerName>_<InstanceQualifier>
  The instance qualifier helps you to distinguish the multiple instances configured from the same source server. For example, you can name your instances as MSSQLSERVER_PROD, MSSQLSERVER_TEST, and so on.
2. Specify the Microsoft SCOM database host name and port number (default value is 1433).
3. Specify the database user name and password.
4. Select the Windows Authentication option if the specified database user is Service Account user.
  If you don't select this option, the database user is an SQL Server user and connection method used will be SQL authentication.
5. Specify the authentication domain name if you plan to use the Windows authentication.
6. Specify the Microsoft SCOM database name.
7. Specify the Microsoft SCOM database instance name.
8. Specify the time, in seconds, after which no attempt should be made to establish a connection (default value is 30 seconds).
Click VALIDATE AND CREATE.
The specified connection details are validated and the corresponding source connection is created in the Source Connection list.
Select the source connection that you created from the list if it is not selected already.
Important
The destination host connection is created and configured automatically for each tenant when the source connection is created.
Ensure that the options for the datatypes for which you want to collect data are selected.
Click a data type and specify the configuration parameters in the Collectors section as described in the following table:
Click CREATE COLLECTORS to create the required collector streams for the selected data types.
Click a data type and specify the configuration parameters in the Distributors section as described in the following table:
Click CREATE DISTRIBUTORS to create the required distributor streams for the selected data types.
Click VALIDATE AND CREATE and then click SAVE STREAM to save the stream.
After you save the stream, the connector that you just created is listed on the SOURCES panel.
On the SOURCES panel, click Configure Mediator for the source connection that you created and then expand MS SCOM Events (JDBC Pull).
Remove the SCOMGroups parameter from the collector configuration.
On the SOURCES panel, move the slider to the right to start the data stream for the connector you created in step 12.

For more information about data streams, see Starting-or-stopping-data-streams.

Removing the SCOMGroups parameter from collector configuration

To improve the performance you need to remove the SCOMGroups parameter for events, metrics, and topology.

Click Configure Mediator adjacent to Microsoft SCOM.
Scroll down and expand the MS SCOM Events (JDBC Pull) section.
Enable the Edit JSON option under the Collector Configuration tab.
You can see the JSON format of collector configuration parameters.
Delete the following JSON object that represents the SCOMGroups parameter:
SCOMGroups parameter in JSON format
"SCOMGroups": {
       "dependentValues": {},
       "choices": []
     },
Click SAVE.
Disable the Edit JSON option and ensure the SCOMGroups parameter is not getting displayed.
Repeat the steps 3 to 6 for the MS SCOM Metrics (JDBC Pull) and MS SCOM Topology (JDBC Pull) sections.
Click SAVE & CLOSE.

Verifying the integration

In BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations , on the SOURCES panel, confirm that the data streams for the integration you created are running. Data streaming is indicated by moving colored arrows.

A moving dark blue arrow () indicates that the event stream is running. Event data will be pushed according to the configured Collection Schedule interval.
A moving red arrow () indicates that the metric stream is running. Metric data will be pushed according to the configured Collection Schedule interval.
A moving light blue arrow () indicates that the topology stream is running. Topology data will be pushed according to the configured Collection Schedule interval.

Viewing data in BMC Helix applications

View data collected from Microsoft SCOM in multiple BMC Helix applications.

Important

If the event or metric data is ingested by using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations, and the topology data is ingested through some other means, all the use cases in BMC Helix AIOps might not work as expected because the external IDs generated by BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations and BMC Helix Discovery differ. In addition, host name might differ in both the products.

To view events in BMC Helix Operations Management

In BMC Helix Operations Management, select Monitoring > Events.
Filter the events by the ScomEvent class.

Incoming events from Microsoft SCOM are processed in BMC Helix Operations Management through a set of deduplication rules to determine whether the incoming event is a duplicate event or a new event. For more information, see Event-deduplication-and-suppression-for-reducing-event-noise.

For more information about events, see Monitoring and managing events

To view metrics in BMC Helix Operations Management

In BMC Helix Operations Management, select Monitoring > Devices.
Click the links for the required device.
On the Monitors tab, click the required monitor.
The Performance Overview tab shows the metrics graph.

For information about metrics, see Viewing collected data.

To view the topology data in BMC Helix Discovery

In BMC Helix Discovery, select Explore > Data, and click <count> Import Records in the Miscellaneous section. The Import Record List page shows the CI records received from Microsoft SCOM. For information about records, see Managing your IT infrastructure .

To view services and situations in BMC Helix AIOps

Before you view services and situations in BMC Helix AIOps, create a Business Service model in BMC Helix Discovery. For information about creating models, see Managing models .

In BMC Helix AIOps, on the Overview page, view the services and situations for the event and topology data received from Microsoft SCOM. For information about situations, see Monitoring and investigating situations.