BMC Helix Availability policy

BMC commits to a specific service level agreement (SLA) for the availability of its services, with service credits if the availability SLA is missed. Unless otherwise stated in your subscription agreement, your availability SLA is 99.9%.

BMC uses its own technologies to monitor your environments and provides monthly availability reports. To learn more about these monitoring technologies, please visit System monitoring.

Availability is a percentage of total service time, such as 99.95 percent, and is calculated by using the following formula:

Availability = (Service Time – Excluded Downtime – Non-excluded Downtime) x 100
                                            (Service Time – Excluded Downtime)

The values in the formula are defined as follows:

  • Service Time: total minutes for a particular calendar month
  • Excluded Downtime: all downtime that is scheduled or mutually agreed-upon for the purpose of performing routine, non-emergency, or emergency maintenance on the services (this includes rolling restarts required on the servers that may temporarily affect user sessions or require the user to re-login), or that occurs on non-production systems. Excluded Downtime also includes downtime that is caused by factors outside the reasonable control of BMC, including, but not limited to, customer-managed performance or automated functional testing.
  • Non-excluded Downtime: all downtime that is not Excluded Downtime
Example

For the month of June, the service time is 720 hours (43,200 minutes). During that month there were 2 hours (120 minutes) of planned maintenance performed on the service. There was an additional 20 minutes of unplanned downtime that was not due to any of the factors listed in Excluded Downtime.

Availability is calculated as follows:

Availability =(43200 – 120 – 20) x 100 = 99.95%
                             (43200 – 120)

In this example, the service level was met.

In the case of unscheduled production downtime on a core component (as defined below), BMC provides a Root Cause Analysis document as described in the BMC-Helix-Incident-Response-policy.

In the event of any production downtime (scheduled or unscheduled), the customer will be notified as defined in the BMC-Helix-Notification-policy.

Core component definition

The BMC Helix Availability policy applies to the following core components:

  • BMC Helix ITSM applications, including Smart IT
  • BMC Helix Digital Workplace service*
  • BMC Helix Business Workflows service
  • BMC-owned Custom Applications offerings
  • BMC Helix Virtual Agent service
  • BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround
  • BMC Helix Portfolio Management
  • BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker
  • BMC Helix iPaaS
  • BMC Helix Premium Connector service
  • Outbound email system*
  • BMC Helix Client Management service
  • BMC Helix Discovery service
  • BMC Helix Continuous Optimization service
  • BMC Helix Automation Console service
  • BMC Helix Operations Management service
  • BMC Helix Continuous Optimization service

Important

You are eligible for service credits in the event BMC does not meet the SLA. Credits for the unavailability of a core component are based on the value of the affected subscription service or services purchased.

Downtime calculations do not necessarily include the sum of all component outages, for example, if BMC Helix Digital Workplace, BMC Helix ITSM, and outbound emails are all confirmed outages at the same time, outage minutes that overlap are not double counted in the system availability calculation.

*Components flagged with an asterisk above will be eligible for service credits only for the subscription service(s) they are part of, for example, the unavailability of Digital Workplace as part of BMC Helix ITSM will entitle you to credits based on the value of the BMC Helix ITSM service. See Requesting a service credit for more information.

Downtime definition by functionality 

The BMC availability policy defines downtime as any of the following unscheduled events:

  • A Total Outage is defined as a full downtime of any core component listed above in Production environments, as indicated by BMC monitoring tools
  • Inability to login and perform work within a core component for the majority of the user population for that component
  • Performance of a core component is impaired to the point of being non-usable and where the issue is deemed to be within the direct control of BMC and a workaround is not available

The following list outlines other functional areas that would classify as sub-component downtime in the case of an unscheduled unavailability event:

  • Inbound email processing

  • In-application reporting functionality, including BMC Helix Dashboards and Smart Reporting

    Important

    Select customers will keep the BMC Helix Innovation Studio - Reporting User service as long as they have extended support from BMC. Please see the Statement of direction for Smart Reporting. 

  • Chat functionality
  • Notification engine processing
  • Approval engine processing
  • Assignment Engine processing
  • Atrium Integrator data import execution
  • VPN or BMC Helix Client Gateway
  • File transfer processing
  • ITSM Insights
  • HelixGPT

Important

Sub-component downtime is not eligible for service credits.  Full unscheduled unavailability in a Production environment will be treated as a severity 1a incident.  Partial unscheduled unavailability in a Production environment will be treated as a severity 1 incident.

Customer customizations causing downtime

The following issues are also considered Excluded Downtime:

  • Any issue caused anywhere in the application based on customer customizations
  • Any issue caused anywhere in the application based on customer integrations 

Requesting a service credit

To receive a service credit, you must submit a request by sending an e-mail message to SLArequest@bmc.com. To be eligible, the credit request must:

  1. Include our support contract ID in the subject of the e-mail message
  2. Include the dates and times of each incident of Non-excluded Downtime that you claim to have experienced in the body of the e-mail
  3. If available, include your server request logs that document the Non-excluded Downtime (any confidential or sensitive information in these logs should be removed or replaced with asterisks)
  4. Be received by BMC within 30 days after the end of the month in which the downtime occurred.

Consult your subscription agreement for any additional SLA terms.

 

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