Glossary

The following list of terms can help you understand the terminology related to the BMC Helix IT Operations Management deployment.

Ansible

Ansible is the simplest way to deploy your applications. It gives you the power to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. You can configure the required services and push application artifacts from one common system.

Ansible is an agentless framework that describes and enforces system states; helping systems and services configuration to be repeatable and reliable following the idempotency principle, where the result of performing an operation once is the same as performing it repeatedly.

Apache Zookeeper

The Apache ZooKeeper is a service for distributed systems that offers a hierarchical key-value store, which is used to provide a distributed configuration service, synchronization service, and naming registry for large distributed systems.

Apache ZooKeeper is a fail-safe, read-dominant, scalable service that stores data in a hierarchical name space. It can be viewed as an atomic broadcast system.

BMC Helix IT Operations Management container images

The BMC Helix IT Operations Management container images are the executable package of software that contains code, libraries, and system settings to deploy the product in your environment.

Containerd

Containerd is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows. It manages the complete container lifecycle of its host system—from image transfer and storage. to container execution and supervision, to low-level storage, to network attachments, and beyond.

Container Network Interface (CNI)

The CNI is a containerization technology for containerizing applications.

CRI-O

CRI-O is an implementation of the Kubernetes CRI (Container Runtime Interface) to enable using It is a lightweight alternative to using Docker as the runtime for Kubernetes. runtime as the container runtime for running pods

Docker

Docker is a set of platforms as a service products that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels

Domain Name System (DNS)

Domain Name System (DNS) is a service that translates domain names into IP addresses.

Elasticsearch

An open source data store to store and search the log traffic from both cluster and applications. This is deployed outside the cluster

External Load Balancer

 An open source data store to store and search the log traffic from both cluster and applications. This is deployed outside the cluster

Filebeat

Filebeat is an open-source shipping agent that lets you ship logs from local files to one or more destinations, including Logstash.

Fluent Bit

Fluent Bit is a Daemon set that is deployed on every cluster. This is responsible for collecting critical or operation logs from the applications and stream it to Elasticsearch.

Fluentd

Use Fluentd to unify data collection and consumption for a better use and understanding of data.

For more information, see  https://www.fluentd.org/  .

Grafana

Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization software available since 2014. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. It is expandable through a plug-in system. It is a visualization service where you can build dashboards on the metrics collected in Prometheus.

Harbor

Harbor is an open-source registry that secures artifacts with policies and role-based access control. For more information, see the Harbor documentation.

Helm

 Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications. Helm Charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Helm is a graduated project in the CNCF and is maintained by the Helm community.

Infrastructure component

Infrastructure components are deployment artifacts that are deployed either in a virtual machine or in the Kubernetes cluster and are accessible from the Kubernetes pods.

Ingress controller

Ingress is an Application Programming Interface (API) object that manages external access to the services in the BMC Helix IT Operations Managementon-premises cluster. An Ingress controller is responsible to fulfill and manage the Ingress, along with a load balancer.

Jenkins

Jenkins is a process engine that can handle complex operations such as deploying, activation, onboarding, and updating/upgrading our platform and peripheral applications. Jenkins is used as part of the deployment engine

Jitterbit

Jitterbit's BMC Helix integration solution eliminates IT data silos and connects key components. This enables faster, automated, and more coordinated service management responses.

Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform developed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. The software is written in Scala and Java. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds – Messaging Service.

Kibana

Kibana is an open-source data visualization dashboard for Elasticsearch. It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on an Elasticsearch cluster. You can use Kibana to create, bar, line, and scatter plots, or pie charts and maps with large volumes of data.

Kubernetes

 Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Load balancer

 A load balancer is a transparent network device that distributes the traffic from multiple tenants to BMC Helix IT Operations Management , which distributes the load across the Kubernetes cluster in case of node failure. 

Logstash

Logstash, a part of the Elastic stack, integrates data from any source, in any format with a flexible, open-source pipeline that is used for collection, parsing, and enrichment.

Master node

A master node is a node in the BMC Helix IT Operations Management  on-premises cluster that controls and manages a set of worker nodes.

NGINX Ingress controller

The NGNIX ingress controller is a traffic-management solution for cloud‑native apps in Kubernetes and containerized environments. With this controller, all applications register the ingress rules for the controller to route traffic to the underlying pods.

On-premises cluster
A Kubernetes cluster that includes artifacts such as the BMC Helix Operations Management, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, Ingress controller, nodes, and infra-services.

On-premises Deployment Manager

Command Line Interface that orchestrates BMC Helix IT Operations Management deployment on a Kubernetes cluster by using Helm.

Open Distro for Elasticsearch

Open Distro for Elasticsearch provides a powerful, easy-to-use event monitoring and alerting system that you can use to monitor your data and send notifications automatically to your stakeholders. With an intuitive Kibana interface and powerful API, Open Distro for Elasticsearch is easy to set up and manage alerts.

Open Shift

OpenShift is an open-source Kubernetes platform by RedHat where you can run containerized applications and workloads.

OS Shell

Bash Shell 4.2 or above.

Persistent storage

Any Kubernetes Storage Class that supports high performance IOPS. 

Many applications require persistent storage where data is maintained permanently.  This storage needs to be external to the containers.

PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) for BMC Helix IT Operations Management containers

A PersistentVolume (PV) is a portion of storage in the BMC Helix IT Operations Management on-premises cluster that has been provisioned by a BMC Helix IT Operations Management administrator or dynamically provisioned by using Storage Classes. A PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) is a request for storage by a BMC Helix IT Operations Management user.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a process to collect and store cluster and application metrics in a time-series database. All cluster-based information, such as pod metrics, node metrics, and ingress metrics along with application-based metrics (JMX and custom) are pulled by Prometheus

Registry

Registry is a single place from where you can access and download the containers for all BMC Helix IT Operations Management components.

VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics (Prometheus) offers long-term remote storage for Prometheus, which is a Linux Foundation open-source time-series database and monitoring system. Time-series databases represent the fastest growing database sector over the last two years

Squid

Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy.

VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics (Prometheus) offers long-term remote storage for Prometheus, which is a Linux Foundation open-source time-series database and monitoring system. Time-series databases represent the fastest growing database sector over the last two years

Worker node

A BMC Helix IT Operations Management on-premises cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized BMC Helix IT Operations Management. The worker nodes host the pods that are the components of BMC Helix IT Operations Management.