BMC Helix Innovation Suite configuration limits
Configuration of an application occurs when an application administrator changes the behavior of the application through the addition or modification of configuration data. Configuration data typically includes various settings, parameters, options, or variables that dictate how the application operates. Some examples of application configuration data are incident assignment rules, change templates, and all foundation data such as company, organization, locations, and support groups. As an Application Administrator, you can do much of your own configuration within the applications themselves without a request for change (RFC). Some advanced configurations, such as creating service request definitions (SRDs), are performed within the development environment but when they are promoted to production, require an RFC.
There are also some configuration settings at system level that can be configured by a System Administrator to make sure that the processes use resources optimally. In BMC Helix environments, many of these configurations are guarded and Application or System Admins on the customer side cannot make any changes. Only the BMC SaaS Operations team can make changes to such settings that can directly impact system performance.
In BMC Helix, there are guardrails and limits on some configuration settings to protect the system from outages, instability, and other issues. Typically, settings such as data to be returned in a call, attachment sizes, number of threads, cache sizes, and chunk sizes have direct impact on memory and CPU consumption of the server processes or database. If the sizing is not determined based on these settings, database or server processes can start responding slowly or can even go down causing outage or instability of the entire system.
To avoid such issues due to poor configuration, we recommend these limits for the following settings in BMC Helix. These settings have default values to ensure optimal utilization of resource for a typical customer of a given size. Based on experience, there are known upper limits for these settings. Beyond these limits, the system can start getting unstable and result in degradation of performance.
Assignment Engine settings
The following table lists the Assignment Engine settings and their default values:
Configuration setting | Description | Default value if the Centralized Configuration parameter is missing | Default value at the time of SaaS activation |
|---|---|---|---|
AE-Poll-Interval | Interval (in minutes) at which the Assignment Engine polls the AR System server. If this option is not specified, the polls occur every 4 minutes. | 4 minutes | 2 minutes |
AE-Worker-Threads | Indicates the total number of worker threads that process various assignment requests. | 3 | 3 |
Approval Server settings
The following table lists the Approval Server settings and their default values:
AR System Server settings
The following table lists the AR System Server settings and their default values for optimal performance:
CMDB settings
The following table lists the CMDB settings and their default values:
Configuration setting | Description | Default value if the Centralized Configuration parameter is missing | Default value at the time of SaaS activation |
|---|---|---|---|
CMDB-Cache-Refresh-Interval | Defines the interval after which CMDB refreshes its cache in the background. Changes you make to this parameter takes effect at the next refresh interval or engine task kill. | 300000 milliseconds | 86400 milliseconds |
Email Engine settings
The following table lists the configuration settings and the default values for optimal performance of the Email Engine:
Configuration Setting | Description | Default value if the Centralized Configuration parameter is missing | Default value at the time of SaaS activation |
|---|---|---|---|
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.ChunkSize | Specifies the number of entries to return when the Email Engine makes a call to the AR System server. | 100 | 300 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.creator_module.cluster.supervisor.metrics.Enable | Specifies whether cluster metrics should be collected. The collected metrics are saved in a CSV file in the /tmp directory and include details such as payload size, thread count, and processing time. Note: Metrics are collected only if the com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.RunEmailCreationConcurrently CCS parameter is also set to True. | False | False |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. EnableWatcherThread | Specifies whether to keep monitoring the mailbox periodically if outgoing messages are being sent. | False | True |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. IncomingMessagesQueueSize | Specifies the message queue size (number of emails). The Receiver module writes messages to the queue, and the Execution module reads messages from this queue to parse and execute. The Receiver module still writes messages to the server in AR System Email Messages form, but the Execution module reads the message from the message queue instead of from the server. This reduces the traffic to the AR System and improves the performance. | 100 | 300 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.Monitor | Specifies the interval in minutes between checks to see if all the threads are functioning properly. If the monitoring system detects that a thread has failed, it restarts the thread. | 30 | 5 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. NumberOfSenderThreads | Specifies the number of sender threads that the email daemon uses for each outgoing mailbox. The optimum number of threads depends on many factors including the number of mailboxes, and the hardware configuration. | 4 | 8 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.POP3Timeout | Specifies whether to wait before cancelling an attempt to connect to the mail server and generating an error. In case of a POP3 timeout, the Email Engine waits for the timeout interval and then marks the queued message as erroneous. POP3Timeout is not used by default. If you want the Email Engine to use this property, you must add it to EmailDaemon.properties and set its value to true. When you set POP3Timeout to true, the POP3TimeoutPeriod property is used. | false | true |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. POP3TimeoutPeriod | Specifies the duration in number of seconds to wait before cancelling an attempt to connect to the mail server and generating an error. In case of a POP3 timeout, the Email Engine waits for this interval and then marks the queued message as erroneous. POP3TimeoutPeriod is not used by default. If you want the Email Engine to use this property, you must add it to EmailDaemon.properties and set its value to any positive integer. |
| 120 |
| com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.RunEmailCreationConcurrently
| Enables the Creator module in the Email Engine to run in multi-threaded mode for improved performance. | False | False |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.SendEmailSetSize | Specifies the number of outgoing emails to query at a time. | 100 | 300 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.SMTPTimeout | Specifies whether to wait before cancelling an attempt to connect to the mail server and generating an error. In case of an SMTP timeout, the Email Engine waits for the timeout interval and then marks the queued message as erroneous. SMTPTimeout is not used by default. If you want the Email Engine to use this property, you must add it to EmailDaemon.properties and set its value to true. If you add the property but do not specify a value, it is considered as false. | false | true |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. SMTPTimeoutPeriod | Specifies the duration in number of seconds to wait before cancelling an attempt to connect to the mail server and generating an error. In case of an SMTP timeout, the Email Engine waits for this interval and then marks the queued message as erroneous. SMTPTimeoutPeriod is not used by default. If you want the Email Engine to use this property, you must add it to EmailDaemon.properties and set its value to any positive integer (upper limit depends on the platform). If you add the property but do not specify a value, the property value is considered as half of the polling interval that is set for outgoing mailboxes. SMTPTimeoutPeriod is dependent on SMTPTimeout ; it works only when SMTPTimeout is set to true. |
| 120 |
com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon. WatcherThreadInterval | Specifies the interval in seconds for monitoring, if the com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.EnableWatcherThread setting is set to True. | 60 | 300 |
Log settings
The following table lists the log settings and their default values:
Plugin settings
The following table lists the plugin settings and their default values: