Managing events and associating them to metrics

The Event Manager node in the Administration tab allows you to enable the collection, classification and association of events to BMC Helix Capacity Optimization metrics.

For more information on managing events, see:

• • Overview
  • User roles for event management
  • Importing micro events
  • Importing macro events

Overview

Events can be imported using ETL tasks, and can then be associated with domains and metrics manually or using a special task. At the end of this process, analysts can view events inside BMC Helix Capacity Optimization analyses and correlate them with performance and business driver KPIs.

To review the main concepts of event management, refer to Events.

Events may be classified in two categories:

• Micro events are managed like BMC Helix Capacity Optimization metrics and can only be automatically imported.
• Macro events are manually managed from the domain configuration page, and can be both automatically and manually imported.

Manual creation of macro events is described in Managing-events. Here we will only present the automatic import of events.

User roles for event management

Event management options are also available to non-administrative users, in the Workspace section. For more information about user options, see Events.

In order for a non-administrative user to be able to edit events, the user account must be allowed to perform the following activities (through user roles):

• WEB_EVENTS to be able to display events
• WEB_EVENTS_EDIT to be able to manage events

The user's access groups must also grant him access to the domain(s) whose events he wants to manage.

The following sections will detail how you can manage micro and macro events from the administration panel.

Importing micro events

Micro events are measured and imported as BMC Helix Capacity Optimization metrics. Examples of micro events are the number of daily tickets by ticket type or the number of daily errors by error code.

A special dataset, WKLTICK, is available for ticket-related metrics.

Importing macro events

The macro event import process is represented in the following diagram:

Event import process for macro events

1. Raw events are extracted from a data source through an ETL task. When importing macro events, ETLs can use a specific dataset (EVDAT) that makes it possible to import events from a ticket or alert management platform.
2. The extracted events are imported into a temporary stage table, waiting for classification. A key point for the integration is, in fact, selecting the appropriate set of events and matching it with the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization event classification model.
3. Raw events are classified by the Event Aggregator task, which performs a lookup of the imported events based on a set of user-defined classification rules. This task can be either scheduled after the ETL daily tasks (because events are not involved in the warehousing process) or executed on-demand.
4. At the end of the process, the classified macro events and their details are stored in the EVENT_DATA table of the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization database, which has a different data structure from the table used by time series. Manually defined macro events are also collected in this table.
5. After the import process is complete, the events are available to the user for manual editing and can be displayed into analysis charts.

An additional step is required to correctly associate the imported events to the entity or domain they refer to. Ticketing platforms, in fact, may refer to entities or domains using names that unknown to BMC Helix Capacity Optimization; thus, an additional association step is needed.

To overcome this problem, BMC Helix Capacity Optimization allows the definition of classification rules that let you set filters and associated actions to be performed on events; this process is further described in Adding-Event-rules.