Expediting service modeling by using service blueprints

BMC IT significantly reduces service model creation time from hours to minutes

BMC IT creates service models for efficiently managing services across BMC. A service topology in a service model includes various components such as storage, software instances, virtual machines, and databases. Creating service models and keeping them up-to-date manually as changes happen in the infrastructure is an arduous and time-consuming task. To expedite the service model creation process, BMC IT uses dynamic service modeling capability provided by BMC Helix AIOps. In dynamic service modeling service blueprints are used for creating service topology.

Service blueprints are predefined, rule-based service templates or building blocks, which can be reused to create multiple services. In addition, when a service is created by using a blueprint, the service topology configuration is updated dynamically whenever there is change in the underlying component (CI) configuration. As a result, operational efficiency increases and service designers are freed up for other tasks.

BMC IT uses the Blueprint Host-to-Service blueprint to create multiple service models such as Finance Management and Cloud Services Management. This blueprint starts with a host node. However, service designers can start with any other node as well when creating blueprints.

Blueprint

The blueprint contains a traversal map of CIs and CI Kinds starting from host to network device that is required to build an end-to-end service topology. By providing only the Host name, BMC IT retrieves the entire CI topology of that service from the IT infrastructure.

Blueprint rules and dynamic updates

The blueprint rules synchronize the data across service topology dynamically whenever there is change in the CI configuration. As shown in the following blueprint, a Hosted Software rule defined on the Host and Cluster link populates the CI topology with only those clusters that are running a software to host the Host. If the cluster on which the Host is hosted is replaced by another cluster, the CI topology of the service is updated dynamically.

CI topology

BMC IT has created the Sales Tax service as a child service to the Finance Management service by using the Blueprint Host-to-Service blueprint and reused the blueprint to create another child service Income Tax, thus saving the time and effort required to create the services individually.

The following figure shows the CI topology of the Sales Tax service, created for the Host for which name was provided as input.  Other connections for that host are identified and mapped from the infrastructure automatically.

The following figure shows the CI topology of the Incident Management service, created for the Host for which name was provided as input . The CIs and hierarchy are different from the Sales Tax service topology even though the same blueprint is used for both the services because the related connections are different for this host in the infrastructure.

Service model

BMC IT has created the following service model for the Finance Management service, which has many child services including Sales Tax and Incident Management. Sales Tax has child services such as Backup and Recovery.

Workflow

Results

By using blueprints to create service topology, BMC IT achieved the following results:

• Reduced the time required to create service topology from hours to minutes.
• Freed up the service designers for other high priority tasks because they could reuse blueprints to create multiple service topologies. 
• Improved the operational efficiency and decision-making capabilities because with blueprints, the topology creation process is automated and all the relevant connections of a host are identified and mapped accurately from the infrastructure.