Integrating with Prometheus to collect events

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 Prometheus connector collects alerts data from Prometheus .

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

BMC Helix application	Type of data collected or viewed	Benefits
BMC Helix Operations Management	Events (alerts received as events)	Use a centralized event view to monitor, filter, and manage events, and perform event operations in one place. Process events to help identify actionable events quickly from a large volume of event data. For more information, see Monitoring events and reducing event noise.
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 Dashboards	Events	Create dashboards to get a consolidated view of data collected from third-party products across your environment. For more information, see Creating custom dashboards

Planning for the connection

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 9093).

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

Configuring the connection with Prometheus

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 the following URL to access BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations:
  https://<hostName>:<portNumber>/swpui
On the CONNECTORS tab, clickin the SOURCES panel .
Click the
Prometheus
Alerts tile.
Specify the following details for the source connection:
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 Prometheus_Host_PROD, Prometheus_Host_TEST, and so on.
2. Specify the Prometheus Alertmanager host name.
3. Specify the Prometheus HTTP or HTTPS port number depending on the connection protocol (default value is 9093).
4. Select the HTTPS option to use an https connection to the Prometheus host.
  Warning
  We recommend that you do not select the Allow Unsigned Certificate option in a production environment. You might want to select this option to allow unsigned certificates in a test environment. See the Prometheus documentation to learn how to install SSL certificates.
5. Specify the number of maximum concurrent REST API requests that should be executed during a collection schedule (d efault value is 5).
6. Specify the user name and password. Ensure that the specified user can access the Prometheus REST API.
7. Click Proxy and specify whether you want to configure a proxy server.
  If yes, specify the host name and port number (default value is 8888).
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.
Click a data type and specify the configuration parameters in the Collectors section as described in the following table:
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Click CREATE COLLECTORS to create the required collector streams for selected data types.

Click a data type and specify the configuration parameters in the Distributors section as described in the following table:

Parameter name	Description
Max Batching Size	Specify the maximum number of data items to send in a single POST request to the destination API. The batch size depends on the destination’s ability to buffer the incoming data.Default: 250
Max Batching Delay	Specify the maximum time (in seconds) to wait before building a batch and processing.Default: 3 seconds
Base Retry Delay	Specify the initial time (in seconds) for which to wait before retrying to build a batch and processing. The waiting time increases in the following sequence: n¹, n², n³, and so on, where n indicates the number of seconds.Default: 2 secondsExample:Base Retry Delay is set to 2 seconds.Retry is performed after 2, 4, 8, 16, ... seconds.
Max Intra-Retry Delay	Specify the maximum limit for the base retry delay. Default: 60 secondsExample:Max Intra-Retry Delay is set to 60 seconds. Base Retry Delay is set to 2 seconds.Retries are performed 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,... seconds later.
Max Retry Duration	Specify the total time for retrying a delivery. For REST destinations, a delivery is a batch of data items in one POST request. Default: 5 minutesExample:Max Retry Duration is set to 8 hours. Base Retry Delay is set to 2 seconds.Requests are sent for 2+4+8+16+32+64+132... until 8 hours in total duration is reached. After that, no subsequent attempts are made to retry the delivery.The assumption here is that if there is an outage or other issue with the destination tool, recovery should take less than the value of the Max Retry Duration parameter to be completed.
Attributes To Be Dropped When Updating Events	Specify the event attributes that you do not want to be updated in BMC Helix Operations Managementwhen events are updated. For example, if you do not want an event's severity, source address, source category, and subcategory to be updated in BMC Helix Operations Management , you need to specify those attributes in a comma-separated format: severity,source_address,source_category,source_subcategory .Important:You can obtain the event attribute names in BMC Helix Operations Management, by exporting any event data in JSON, BAROC, XML, or CSV format . The exported file contains all attributes of the event data, and from there you can identify the attributes to be dropped.

Click CREATE DISTRIBUTORS to create the required distributor streams for the selected data types.
Click one of the following buttons:
- SAVE STREAM : Click this button if you want to edit the integration details before creating the instance. After you save the stream, the connector that you just created is listed in the SOURCES panel. Move the slider to the right to start the data stream.
- SAVE AND START STREAM : Click this button if you want to save the integration details and start receiving data immediately.
ImportantFor a data stream, the Run Latency (max/avg), Items (Avg per Run), and Last Run Status columns on the Streams page might show No Runs as the status during the data collection process. After the completion of the process, these columns are updated with an appropriate status.

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

Verifying the connection

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.

Viewing data in 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 PromotheusAlert class.

Important

If an event does not include the source's host name from which the event has been received, the Host column on the Events page shows the name of the computer where Prometheus is installed.

Incoming events from Prometheus 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-suppression-and-closure-for-reducing-event-noise.

For information about events, see Monitoring and managing events.

To view situations in BMC Helix AIOps

Before you view 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 to view the situations for the event data received from Prometheus.