Product overview

BMC Helix Continuous Optimizationis a capacity management solution that helps you maximize system uptime by giving you insights to optimize the use of your current IT resources and plan for future demands. It collects and analyzes the capacity data and core metrics for CPU, memory, and storage and provides recommendations for optimizing them. You can model future resource needs and predict what IT resources you will need.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimizationis part of the BMC Helix IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution. It is built on a microservices-based architecture and is available both as a SaaS service and a container-based on-premises deployment. You access BMC Helix Continuous Optimization through BMC Helix Portal, which is the launchpad to your licensed BMC Helix services. BMC Helix Portal provides a single, unified view for an improved end-user experience. You perform user management and tenant management functions from BMC Helix Portal.

Product capabilities

BMC Helix Continuous Optimizationprovides the following key capabilities:

Capacity insights

Gain visibility into resource and services capacity, utilization, and utilization trends. Use the infrastructure data to understand the usage and performance of your infrastructure elements and services.

Use case	Details	Reference
Infrastructure insights	Use out-of-the-box capacity views to gain visibility into your infrastructure resources. View the usage and availability of all infrastructure resources - on-premises and public cloud. Define customized views according to your requirements.	Analyzing-your-infrastructure-data-by-using-capacity-views
Business services insights	Understand the overall health and status of the business services. Analyze capacity at the service pool or deployment level. Analyze the predicted growth of business drivers associated with a business service. Get at-a-glance insight into technology resource usage.	Analyzing-business-services
Dashboards and reporting	Create visualization dashboards in BMC Helix Dashboards to keep the stakeholders informed about capacity. Create custom dashboards based on metrics, data marts, and business services. Export and share dashboards with users. Schedule dashboards as reports for automatic distribution.	Using-BMC-Helix-Dashboards
Dashboards and reporting	Create and manage the reports in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to keep the stakeholders informed about capacity. Create a report by using existing analyses and models or by using report templates. Create a report by leveraging the definition of dashboards created in BMC Helix Dashboards.	Creating-reports Creating-reports-by-using-the-BMC-Helix-Dashboards-definitions

Service assurance

Provide service assurance by identifying and avoiding risks such as immediate or upcoming resource saturation (for example, in the next 30 days).

Use case	Details	Reference
Risk identification and management	Review and analyze out-of-the-box recommendations to detect and resolve capacity risk issues.	Resolving-capacity-risk-and-efficiency-issues-by-using-recommendations
Identification of capacity requirements for the organic growth of resources	Predict the growth of your resources based on the previous behavior or based on an expected increase in the usage of resources. Predict the behavior and analyze the capacity of resources for a business service based on the associated business drivers.	Predicting-the-growth-of-your-resources-by-using-simulations
Risk prediction for services	Analyze any business service risk issues with a single pane of glass showing the health of all business services based on the correlation between business drivers and resources of a pool.	Using-BMC-Helix-Dashboards

Resource optimization

Identify issues that affect efficiency; for example, idle VMs, overallocated VMs, Power On/Off VMs and resolve them.

Use case	Details	Reference
Resource rightsizing	Review and analyze out-of-the-box recommendations for rightsizing overallocated resources based on usage patterns.	Resolving-capacity-risk-and-efficiency-issues-by-using-recommendations
Resource rightsizing	Use the integration with BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to send resizing recommendations of overallocated containers.	Integrating-with-BMC-Helix-Intelligent-Automation-to-send-resizing-recommendations-for-overallocated-containers
Unused resource management	Review and analyze out-of-the-box recommendations for managing the unused resources (for example, idle VMs). Review and analyze out-of-the-box recommendations for managing the VMs that display a regular usage pattern with a significant idle time (for example, power on/off VMs).	Resolving-capacity-risk-and-efficiency-issues-by-using-recommendations

Capacity planning

Predict the infrastructure needs, estimate whether the existing infrastructure is adequate to meet current and future demands, and plan accordingly for a new infrastructure.

Use case	Details	Reference
Simulate migration to cloud	Plan your move to the cloud with right-sizing recommendations that let you review future cost estimates and cost trends of migrating on-premises servers to the public cloud.	Estimating-the-cost-of-migrating-servers-to-the-public-cloud
Forecasting and modeling	Perform the what-if analysis to predict the resource needs of systems and business drivers.	Modeling-capacity-usage
Plan for future events	Simulate future events to analyze business and IT capacity needs to ensure efficient use of your resources.	Predicting-the-growth-of-your-resources-by-using-simulations

End-to-end use cases

BMC Helix Continuous Optimizationsupports various capacity management, planning, and optimization use cases.

The Managing-the-capacity-of-your-infrastructure section guides you through end-to-end use cases by specific technologies and describes how you can implement BMC Helix Continuous Optimization in your environment.

The following figure highlights the main goals that BMC Helix Continuous Optimization helps you achieve. Every use case has been put together by taking into account these goals.

HOCO_goals_21.3.png

The following table provides a quick summary of the main questions these goals will help to answer while running the typical capacity-related end to end use cases documented in the Managing-the-capacity-of-your-infrastructure section:

	Understand usage	How do I get visibility into all the IT resources? What is the current utilization level? What is the cost of the current utilization? Where is the highest resource consumption? Which business service or department consumes the most resources? How do I provide stakeholders insights about resource usage?
	Avoid risk	Are there any upcoming saturations? Do I have enough resources supporting my critical business applications? Is a resource at risk due to overload that might cause performance issues? How many additional users can I support given the current utilization trend?
	Improve efficiency	Are there any underutilized or overallocated resources? Is there an opportunity to optimize capacity, increase density, or reduce cost? Can I identify wasted and unused capacity (idle VMs, unmapped volumes, old snapshots) Is there an opportunity for consolidation, virtualization, or migration to cloud?
	Manage demand	Can I satisfy new workload requirements for the next 6 months? Which is the best target to deploy my application X? How do I ensure I have the resources to successfully deliver my upcoming projects?

Migrating from TrueSight Capacity Optimization

If you want to use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to manage the capacity of your on-premises environment that is currently being managed by TrueSight Capacity Optimization, migrate to BMC Helix Continuous Optimization by using the out-of-the-box migration toolkit. For more information, see Migrating-to-BMC-Helix-Continuous-Optimization.

User roles

The following user roles are available out-of-the-box in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization:

User role	Description
Capacity Administrator	Users with this role can access all the sections of the product and perform all the administrative activities. For example, install and upgrade the on premises components, create and assign roles and permissions to other users, set up and customize integrations, and create custom views.
Capacity Planner	Users with this role can perform all the capacity planning activities. These users can access the Views and the Workspace sections in the product. Additionally, these users can view and edit the optimizer rules in the Administration section.
Capacity Operator	Users with this role can access only the Views section in the product.

Product training

Explore the training and certification offerings available for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization on our BMC Education portal.

Additional product assistance

All users should view and set up a watch on the Release-notes-and-notices page for the latest product information and documentation updates.
Refer to the BMC Community page for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. Experts from BMC can help you out with your queries.
Refer to the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization page for additional resources.