Preparing for Self-Monitoring

Install a PATROL Agent

Install a PATROL Agent to monitor the VMWare vSphere of your Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster.
For more information, see BMC PATROL Agent for BMC Helix Operations Management.

The PATROL Agent collects and sends VMware metrics to BMC Helix IT Operations Management on the observability stack.

An admin user installing the PATROL Agent must have permission to create the cluster role and role-binding objects. The Agent utilizes the default service account for the PATROL Agent.

Download the container images

The BMC Helix ITOM container images are hosted on the BMC Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) which is available at containers.bmc.com.

Download the Log_Analytics_and_Agent_images.txt file.

Download the self-monitoring blueprint

You must download the blueprint for OpenShift self-monitoring to create service models to monitor your on-premises BMC Helix IT Operations Management in an OpenShift cluster.  

A default service blueprint is available on BMC Helix AIOps to monitor your on-premises BMC Helix IT Operations Management in a Kubernetes cluster.  

Verify the connectivity

Make sure there are no firewall restrictions that hinder the connectivity between the components:

• Make sure the following components are deployed on the production stack can send data to the non-production stack:
  • BMC Helix Monitor Agent
  • Log Analytics connector for Kubernetes
  • Ceph server
• Make sure the BMC Discovery deployed on the observability stack can communicate with the following components on the production stack:
  • vSphere that belongs to VCenter/ESX where the worker nodes are installed.
  • Ceph server if it is used.
  • SSH connection to the worker nodes.

Verify the Ceph server is enabled with API support

Install the Ceph RESTful API (Ceph API) provided by the Ceph Dashboard module. The Ceph Server KM and BMC Discovery use the Ceph RESTful API to connect and monitor the Ceph servers.

For more information, see CEPH RESTFUL API in the Ceph documentation.

Verify the certificates and security

• Create a BMC Helix Operations Management access key and secret key for the administrator user.
  You will need the keys to import policies and dashboards.
  For more information, see Setting up access keys for programmatic access in BMC Helix Portal documentation.

• Get the BMC Discovery system user ID and password. You will need them to configure the Synthetic and Scripting KM and monitor the BMC Discovery status.
• Get the BMC Discovery tideway user credentials. You will need them while conjuring the Self-Monitoring-Discovery-Appliance-Linux-Monitor policy for BMC Discovery.

• Acquire your non-production stack tenant certificate. You must enter the tenant certificate information while configuring the BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
  For more information, in the BMC Helix Operations Management documentation, go to the topic Using BMC Helix Monitor Agent to collect data. Under Deploying BMC Helix Monitor Agent, expand the Chrome browser.

• Create a observability stack tenant access key and secret key. You will need the keys to import policies and dashboards.
  For more information, see Setting up access keys for programmatic access in BMC Helix Portal documentation.

• The pod security standard of the namespace where you will install BMC Helix Monitor Agent must be set to baseline.

  Important

  The BMC Helix Monitor Agent namespace should be different from the BMC Helix ITOMnamespace.

  If you cannot set the pod security standard of the namespace to privileged, you can set it to baseline instead. However, the OpenShift daemonset for network and filesystem monitoring will not function when you set the pod security standard of the namespace to baseline.