Glossary

Apache Zookeeper

It is an open-source robust coordination service for distributed systems.  It helps users address common challenges distributed applications face. You can use Apache Zookeeper to store configuration information, identify the nodes in a Kubernetes cluster by name (naming service), distributed synchronization, and provide service used by a cluster to co-ordinate between themselves and maintain shared data (group services). 

BMC Helix IT Operations Management container images

The BMC Helix ITOM container images are the executable packages of software that contain code, libraries, and system settings to deploy the product in your environment.

BMC Helix ITOM namespace

The namespace in which you have installed BMC Helix ITOM.

BMC Helix Platform Common Services

BMC Helix Platform Common Services is a microservices-based platform that provides foundational services (such as user management, tenant management, and single sign-on) and the data lake.

The Deployment Manager deploys the service tier, d ata tier, and a pplications tier components. The service tier and data tier components are together called the BMC Helix Platform Common Services . 

For more information, see Deployment-architecture.

Container Network Interface (CNI)

Container Network Interface plugins are used by container runtimes to manage the network and security capabilities. Container runtimes implement the Kubernetes network model.  By using the CNI you can add and remove network interfaces, integrate with other container orchestration systems, and run several CNI plugins (Multus CNI). 

Controller (Bastion machine)

The controller or the bastion machine is used to trigger the deployment of BMC Helix ITOM into the Kubernetes cluster. This machine will have access to a Kubernetes cluster using the kubeconfig file which contains cluster authentication information such as secrets, token, namespaces for kubectl command line tool. 

Deployment configuration files

The deployment scripts are located at helix-on-prem-deployment-manager/configs/ and are used to specify the parameters required to deploy BMC Helix ITOM . There are two deployment scripts:  

• infra.config - Use this file to specify the infrastructure details.
• deployment.config - Based on your business requirements and license entitlement, use this file to specify the applications that you want to install.

For more information, see Configuration-file-settings.

Docker

Docker is a virtualization software that makes developing and deploying applications simple. Docker makes it possible by packaging an application into a container which has everything the application needs to run such as the application code, its libraries, and dependencies, the runtime, and environment configurations. This Docker package can be easily shared and distributed.

Docker Trusted Registry

The BMC Helix ITOM container images are hosted on the BMC DTR.
BMC DTR is a single place from where you can access and download the container images for all BMC Helix IT Operations Management components. 

Domain Name Server (DNS)

Domain name server is a service that matches IP addresses to domain names making it easy for the users to visit websites. Here domain name is the location of the website. Using the DNS you can access the websites located on the web servers.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine. It is a multi-tenant capable full-text search engine with HTTP web server interface. It converts raw data such as logs files or message files into internal documents and stores them in a basic data structure.

External Load Balancer

External load balancers regulate the traffic coming from the internet/intranet, run security checks, and directs it to an Nginx Ingress controller running in the virtual private network.

Fluent Bit

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

Grafana

Grafana is an open-source, multi-platform web application for the visualization of data.  You can build charts, graphs, and dashboards of data that you want to visualize. The data could be generated from different sources like Jenkins server, Kubernetes pod, virtual machine, and so on. This data would get stored in a data source like Prometheus which is queried by Grafana (in the form of metrics or logs) and displayed on the Grafana dashboard.

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 is an application package manager for Kubernetes that is used in the automated installation, version management, and dependency management. Using the Helm charts, you can describe the structure of the application.

Ingress controller

Ingress controller is a load balancer built within the Kubernetes cluster. Ingress helps the users to access the applications within the Kubernetes cluster using a single accessible URL that can be configured to route the traffic to different services within the cluster using the URL path. But, even with Ingress implemented, you still need to make it accessible outside the cluster for which an external load balancer is needed.

Kafka

Apache Kafka or Kafka is a platform where you can publish data or subscribe to read data.  The data stored in Kafka is fault-tolerant (continued availability of data in times of system failure) and can be processed in real-time. Therefore, you can use Kafka to build data pipelines that move data in real-time.  Kafka is also used when applications need to react quickly to specific events.  Due to these features, Kafka is used in scenarios that need High Availability and Disaster Recovery. 

Kibana

Kibana is an integral part of the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) stack. It provides the front end or the user interface to the ELK stack. You can do the searching and interact with the data in Elasticsearch. It allows you to perform advanced analytics and create reports and dynamic dashboards of those reports which can be shared with others. The dynamic dashboards get updated in real-time. You can use Kibana to create bar plots, line plots, scatter plots, pie charts and maps with large volumes of data.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source service. It is a container orchestration system for automating application deployment, managing, and scaling. It is managed by CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

Master node

A master node in a Kubernetes architecture is used to manage the states of a cluster. It controls and manages a set of worker nodes.

Nginx ingress controller

Nginx Ingress controller is used to configure a load balancer for Kubernetes environments.  It is a special load balancer for the Kubernetes cluster.

On-premises cluster

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

Deployment Manager

An entity that is used to deploy BMC Helix Platform Common Services and the BMC Helix ITOM applications in your environment.
It is a 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

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

Persistence Volume

A persistent volume is a piece of storage in the K8 cluster provided by the administrator. It provides high-performance IOPS (input-output service). This storage needs to be external to the containers as many applications in the cluster require persistent storage where data is maintained permanently.

PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC)

When a developer needs persistent storage for an application in the cluster, they request that storage by creating a persistent volume claim (PVC) and then mounting the volume to a path in the pod.

Docker Trusted Registry

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

VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics (Prometheus) offers long-term remote storage for Prometheus, which is a Linux Foundation open-source time-series database and monitoring system. 

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 p ods that are the components of BMC Helix IT Operations Management.

Workspace directory

The directory where you extracted the Deployment Manager files.