Managing models

Services and application modeling home page components

The Services and Application modeling home page shows totals for models in the following using states:

• Any State—A count of models in any state.
• Not published—Models that have been saved, but not published, meaning that they have not yet created a service or application node.
• Review suggested—Sometimes for start anywhere models, automatic model updates would change a model a great deal, either in one single change or as a result of a gradual expansion over time. When BMC Helix Discovery detects that an update would cause a large change, it suppresses most of the change, and sets the application model into a state of Review Suggested. When the model enters Review Suggested, only new nodes directly connected to nodes that were previously in the model are added – any nodes downstream of those new nodes are suppressed. Once the model is in Review Suggested, BMC Helix Discovery no longer updates it during scanning. See Lifecycle of a model for more details.
• Published models—Blueprint, rules or start anywhere models that have been published. Blueprint models are always published; once created, they have no other state.
• Services & applications—Links to a list of services and applications that have been created from published models.
• Review suggested—Start anywhere models that have been published, and require a user review in the same way as the user review described for unpublished models.
• CAM models—Models created using CAM.
• Other BAIs—Other BAIs.

The totals are links to:

• list views, for example, the Model Definition List:
  
• or node pages, such as the Model Definition page, that show the models or BAIs:
  

The totals content is displayed in tabs which enable you to view totals for:

• All—totals for the BMC Helix Discovery system.
• Favorites—totals for those models marked as your favorites.

When you have saved a model, it is considered a favorite, which is denoted by a blue star under the workflow bar. Clicking the star toggles whether the model is a favorite or not. A blue star shows a favorite, a gray star shows a model that is not a favorite. You can also mark existing models or model definitions as favorites on their view pages.

The modeling home page also provides an activity stream which shows a list of modeling related activities for the system.

• Click a row in the activity stream to view the application model.
• Some rows have details links, for example for an operation where nodes were removed from a model. Click details to see an activity record of that operation. For example:
  

You can also see a compact view of application modeling home page on the UI home page.

To view a service or application model 

To view a service or application model:

1. Click the category (Not published, Review suggested, Published) from the totals list containing the model definition that you want to view.
   For the Services & Applications category, which show published models, the results might include multiple kinds of models (Business Application, Business Service, or Technical Service). In this case, select the model kind from the list.
2. Select the model you want to view from the list. 
3. The model type (Blueprint or SAM) can be determined from the model heading.
   • Blueprint models have the following heading, with a RULES icon after the name:
     
     Blueprint models, once created, are always in the published state. 

   • Blueprint templates have the following heading, with a RULES_TEMPLATE icon after the name:
     
     Clicking Run as a query opens the template in the Visual Query Builder.

   • Start anywhere models have the following heading, with a SAM icon after the name:
     

   • Models, whether Blueprint or SAM that have been synced from a consolidator have a SYNC icon. They also have a Maintain Locally button to take local control of the model and break the synchronization link with the sending consolidation system. See Consolidation for more information. 
     

      

To create or import service and application models

You can create or import application models from the Services and Application modeling home page. To do this, click Create/Import.

To create an empty start anywhere model

When you click Create/Import, the default tab displayed is Create. Create an empty service or application model to which you can add nodes by searching the data, visualizing it, and then adding the data to the empty model using Model > Add to Existing. 

To do this:

To create a model using search

Use the search box from any page to find interesting items, and start modeling from the results. You can start modeling anywhere in BMC Helix Discovery. See Start anywhere modeling for more information.

To create a service model by using a visual query

The visual query builder provides a way of selecting the nodes that you want in your model by using the visual query builder. 

To do this: 

To create a service model by using blueprints

Blueprints are definitions of simple rules that can identify the nodes within services.

• To create and modify models using existing Blueprints, click Blueprint Service Editor. See Modeling services by using blueprints for more information.

• To add new and modify existing Blueprints, click Manage Blueprint Definitions. See Managing blueprint definitions for more information.

To create a Legacy CAM model

Click the Legacy CAM tab for the start point to creating a Legacy CAM model. The starting point is creating a group.

To do this:

To import a model

You import models from the Services and Application modeling home page. To do this:

To export a model

You export models in the following ways:

• From the Model Definition List.

  1. Select the model, or models, from the list
  2. From the Actions menu, select Export Model Definitions.
  3. The model or models are exported in zip archives.

• From the Model Definition page.

  1. From the Actions menu, select  Export Model.
  2. The model is exported in a file named as the model definition and with a .model suffix.