This documentation supports BMC Helix AIOps till November 2021. To view other versions of the documentation, select a version from the Product version menu.

Services and service topology

A service is a logical group of applications, middleware, security, storage, networks, and other subservices that work together to achieve a comprehensive, end-to-end business goal. HR service, admin service, and payroll service are a few examples of business services. 

A few advantages of defining a service are:

  • Enables you to efficiently manage the underlying applications and infrastructure relevant to your business. 
  • Provides an option to track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) associated with the service.

In BMC Helix AIOps, you can view services from the components that are integrated with BMC Helix Portal. For more information, see Data-providers-for-BMC-Helix-AIOps.

Related topics

Service-health-score-impact-score-and-metrics

Event-noise-reduction-indicator-for-prioritized-triage-and-remediation

Total-incident-count-and-mean-time-to-resolve-MTTR-indicators-for-a-reliable-incidence-response-process

Service entities

A service contains entities. The following list represents a few entity types:

  • Device
  • Host
  • Database
  • Another service
  • Computer application

The health of a service depends on the health of its entities. For example, a JIRA management service contains entities such as Incident Management, Change Management, Web server, and a database. If the Change Management system is down or its performance is highly impacted, the JIRA management service is also impacted. In a service model, each service entity is referred to as a Configuration Item (CI). 

Note

Service entities and Configuration items are interchangeably used in BMC Helix AIOps.

Impacted entities and Impacted CIs

Impacted Entities on the service details page displays the top 3 impacted business services that are part of the main impacted service. In the following example, BMC Banking Application and Banking Core Servers are the top impacted business services that are part of the BMC Financial Service business service. Impacting Events shows the number of open events impacting the services. 

Impacted entities.png

Impacted CIs

Impacted CIs on the Services page displays the total count of impacted CIs associated with a service. In the following example, there are 4 impacted CIs that are associated with the Andy test service.

services_page.png


Service topology

A service topology is a graphical representation that shows a dynamic and pictorial view of a service model, which is displayed in the Topology tab of the service details page. The following image is an example of a service topology:

service_topology_op1.png


  • The nodes in the service topology are represented using different symbols. Click a node to view its details. 
    A few examples are listed in the following table. 

    Symbol

    business_service_icon.png

    software_instance_icon.png

    host_icon.png

    Description

    Business service

    Software Instance

    Host

  • The nodes in the service topology are color-coded according to their impact severity:
    severity_mapping.png
  • The service topology also shows the direction of the impact flow among the service nodes. In the preceding example, the pd-02 host is critically impacted and its impact is flowing to the aiops_automation1 business service through both the VMware Tools and BladeLogic software instances.

Where to go from here

Performing-ML-based-root-cause-isolation-of-an-impacted-service