Visualizing the overall health and status of the business services

Without insights into the risk and efficiency of business services, the assurance of your business services can be disrupted. As a service owner, get insights into the overall health and status of the business services by using the dashboard capabilities of BMC Helix Dashboards. 

To visualize the business service data, use one of the following capabilities: 

• Use the Out-of-the-box Service Risk Dashboard to quickly start visualizing and analyzing business services in your environment without the need to create a custom dashboard manually. 
• Build a customized dashboard that can be tailored according to additional requirements, such as different roles or specific business services. Use the Service Risk and Mitigation query type and visualization plug-in to build the custom dashboard for business services. 

Resources (CPU, memory, and storage) at the pool level in a business service are correlated with the business driver metrics. This correlation is used to forecast growth by evaluating the projection of the utilization metrics. For details, see Business-services-applications-business-drivers-and-service-pools and Analyzing-business-services.

The chart in the dashboard displays whether the business driver growth is limited by one of these resources, because they are correlated. This information can help to mitigate any risks associated with your business service. 

The following image shows the dashboard with sample data:

Out-of-the-box Service Risk Dashboard 

Use the Out-of-the-box Service Risk Dashboard to quickly start visualizing and analyzing business services in your environment. For details, see Service Risk Dashboard.

To create a custom dashboard for business servicesPerform the following steps to create a custom dashboard: 

Task 1: To fetch the business service data

Use the Service Risk and Mitigation query type to fetch the business service data from BMC Helix Continuous Optimization.

1. Log in to BMC Helix Portal as a capacity planner.
   Note: Ensure that the Editor role is assigned to the capacity planner user.
2. Click the BMC Helix Dashboards tile.
3. On the left navigation pane, do one of the following actions:
   
   • Hover the mouse over the Create icon  and then click Dashboard.
   • Hover the mouse over the Dashboards icon , click Browse, and then click the New Dashboard button.
4. On the New dashboard page, click Add new panel.
5. In the Query section, select the BMC Helix data source for the query.

6. Configure the following parameters, and save the query:
7. (optional) To add an additional query, click + Query, and specify the query options as described in the previous step.
8. Select the required visualization type.
9. Enter a name for the dashboard, select a folder, and click Save. The new dashboard is displayed with the relevant data. 

(Optional) Task 2: To configure a variable for displaying additional business services panels

Variables work as placeholders for values that you can use in dashboard queries and panel titles. Instead of hard-coding details such as the service name or the application name, use variables in your queries so that the system picks up the details at run-time.

Configure a variable for displaying additional business services panels:

1. On a custom dashboard, click Dashboard settings .
2. On the navigation bar, click Variables.
3. Click Add new variable and specify the following values:
   
   1. Name: Name of the variable. For example, BS.
   2. Type: Query
   3. Label: Label that will be displayed as a filter in the dashboard. For example, Business Services.
   4. Hide: Variable
   5. Data source: BMC Helix
   6. Query: bs-risk-and-mitigation,bs
   7. Refresh: On dashboard load
   8. Sort: Disabled
      You can see the list of available business services under Preview of values.

4. Select relevant Selection options and click Update. The new variable is created and ready to use in a query. 

   For more information about variables, see Setting up variables for dashboard queries, filtering data, and panel title values.

The following video displays the example on how to create a variable to configure additional business services:

Task 3: To visualize the business service data

Use the BMC Service Risk and Mitigation visualization plug-in to visualize the business service performance based on the correlation between business drivers and resources of a pool on a dashboard. 

1. Edit the panel that you created for business services. 
2. On the Panel tab, expand Visualization and select BMC Service Risk and Mitigation.
3. Click Save.

The dashboard includes a single chart for a business service and displays the following details: 

• Chart: Separate series for each resources (CPU, memory and storage) based on their correlation with the business driver in that business service. For example, if the business driver is correlated with only CPU and memory, two series each for CPU and memory are displayed. Each series displays the historical data and the prediction data based on the default time period in the What-if simulation of this business service. For details, see Creating-a-What-if-simulation-for-business-services-and-viewing-the-simulation-results. This helps to identify a critical resource causing the risk to the business service. 
• In case of a resource saturation, the day when the business service will be at risk.
• Risk indicator: An indication that CPU, memory, or storage resource of a pool in a business service is either already saturated or will soon be experiencing capacity contention. The color-coded icons represent the level of risk for business services: green for healthy, orange for medium risk, and red for high risk business services.

• Days to Risk indicator: Indicates the estimated number of days before the CPU, memory, and storage resources achieve the configured threshold. No risk is displayed for healthy business services.