23.2 enhancements and patches

BMC applies upgrades as described in the BMC Helix Upgrade policy. BMC applies upgrades and patches during Maintenance windows.

23.2.02

Configure advanced service health settings

As a service designer, take control of how you want to define the service health status, health score computation, and impact propagation from child services according to your organization’s needs. You can use the following service configuration options to achieve this goal:

• Health indicators
• Event rules
• Balancing profiles
• Health impact propagation 
• Health severity score and status

Add health indicators

Specify particular metrics as health indicators of a service from the set of metrics available for the service.

After the thresholds for health indicators are breached, events are generated. Service health score is computed based on the impact score assigned to the severity of these events as defined in the health score configuration.

You can no longer add health indicators on the Define Service pane. Add them by using the Health Indicators tab.

For more information, see Adding-health-indicators.

Define event rules

You can define event rules to consider only the events of interest based on the impacted CIs, severities, or messages, and discard the ones not required.

When a service is impacted, the health score is computed based on the impact score assigned to the severity of these events as defined in the health score configuration. By default, health score of a service is computed based on all the events generated on all the CIs that are part of a service.

For more information, see Adding-event-rules. 

Define balancing profiles

You can define a balancing profile to determine the CIs and their thresholds (in number or percentage) for a service. Service health is impacted when the threshold is breached. By default, all CIs of a service are considered for computing the service health score.

For more information, see Adding-balancing-profiles.

Customize health score and status for a service

You can view the default values for the health score and health status for each service. You can also customize these values for health score computation. 

For more information, see Customizing-health-score-and-health-status.

Configure service impact propagation

When a service is impacted, it can be due to the events impacting the parent service or due to the impact propagated from the impacted child services. Impact propagation from child services is applicable when the Health from child services is propagated to this service check box is enabled. In such a scenario, the health score of a service is computed by considering the lowest health score across the service and its child services.

If you don't want to propagate the health score of child services to a parent service, clear the Health from child services is propagated to this service check box.

For more information, see Customizing-health-score-and-health-status. 

View total events, impacting events, and impacting sub-services for impacted services

For an impacted service, the Total Events count indicates the total number of events generated for the service and the Impacting Events count indicates the number of events considered for computing the health score.

If the impact on a child service is higher than a parent service (health score is lower than the parent service) or if there are no events impacting a parent service, instead of Total Events and Impacting Events, the Impacting Sub-Services count is displayed. You can hover over the number to view the names of the impacting child services. 

For more information, see Monitoring-service-health.

Search for a service quickly

Locate a service quickly in the service hierarchy by using the search box when performing the following operations on the service:

• Viewing the service in the Service Hierarchy tab: When the service is located, it appears in the center of the service hierarchy view.

• Editing the service: When you open a service for editing and search for another service in the service hierarchy, the searched service is highlighted and all other services are grouped under the Additional Services node at different levels of the hierarchy. For more information, see To edit a service in the service model.

Group and ungroup services when editing

You can group or ungroup services when you open a service for editing. By default, except for the service being edited all other services are grouped as additional services. Click Disable Grouping by Service Hierarchy to ungroup the services and view the entire hierarchy.

23.2.01

Access self-help resources with in-app help

In-app help is available from a floating widget at the bottom of every screen. Click the self-help widget to access a product tour, interactive guides, instructions for setting up and going live, and more. In addition, you can continue to find answers to your questions in the online documentation or in our YouTube playlist.

23.2.00

Learn about the new features and enhancements in this release in the following video (2:34): 

https://youtu.be/CtQyLk4BLUI

Reduce noise and MTTR with Master Situations and Similar Situations

BMC Helix AIOps provides the following capabilities to reduce noise and improve mean time to resolve (MTTR):

Master Situations

Master Situations reduces noise by grouping together similar open situations that occurred due to a similar issue and impacted multiple services across the service hierarchy. Instead of troubleshooting each service and its situation separately, operators or SREs can troubleshoot the Master Situation. BMC Helix AIOps leverages AI/ML algorithms to find situation similarity due to temporal, topological or knowledge graph relationships. This helps to further reduce the noise and improve MTTR.

For more information, see Monitoring-situations.

Similar Situations

Similar Situations provides insights to operators or site reliability engineers (SREs) to optimize the service performance by taking proactive actions on problems that impact a service in their organization. BMC Helix AIOps uses AI/ML algorithms to group situations of similar nature based on their repeated impact on the service in the past. Operators or SREs can perform historical analysis on problems, look at the number of incidents raised, automation runs, severity of situations, time of past occurrences and other useful information and take meaningful actions.  

Similar Situations also helps in faster root cause isolation. For any open situation, it provides much-needed context to operators or SREs to understand how a similar situation was resolved in the past, the actions taken to resolve it, and the root cause that was identified. Based on this, they can take similar actions to diagnose and fix the given situation and hence reduce MTTR.

View additional details for a situation from a single page

View the situation details, including impacted CIs in the service topology, related situations, and similar situations from a single page. 

By looking at the similar, closed situations associated with an open situation, you can take corrective actions to troubleshoot the currently open situation. Also, the related situations of a situation can help you identify the root cause of the impact.

For more information, see Investigating-ML-based-situations.

Configure settings to group similar situations

The following settings are available for grouping similar situations on the Manage Situations page under Configurations:

• Expiry of Similar Situation Group (in days): Determines the maximum number of idle days for a group of similar situations to be marked as expired.
• Similar Situation Detection Window (in hours): Determines the hourly interval to detect similar situations and form the groups.

For more information, see Configuring-ML-based-situations.

Import additional out-of-the-box service blueprints

BMC Helix AIOps supports the following new out-of-the-box service blueprints that you can use for building service models for multiple domains:

 For the complete list of out-of-the-box blueprints, see Using-out-of-the-box-blueprints.

Rearrange sections on the service details page

Use the move icon to rearrange sections on the service details page.

For more information, see Monitoring service health.