Monitoring the health of your IT assets

BMC provides comprehensive asset management throughout the lifecycle of IT assets. Through seamless integration with various applications and processes, BMC's asset management solution simplifies asset deployment and facilitates usage and health monitoring.

Implement the asset health monitoring use case to achieve the following business goals:

• Reduce time to monitor and troubleshoot IT asset problems from hours to minutes.
• Free up time for IT personnel to focus on high-priority tasks because the complete asset lifecycle management and monitoring are automated and seamlessly integrated.
• Improve operational efficiency, achieved through automated topology creation and accurate identification and mapping of all relevant connections within your infrastructure.

Asset lifecycle overview

The asset lifecycle starts with planning and acquiring assets. An Asset Manager strategizes their purchase and inclusion into the IT inventory and then deploys them to specific business lines.

During the lifecycle, the IT Operator monitors deployed assets for health and takes action when issues arise. Use the following capabilities in BMC Helix solutions for automatic discovery, integration, maintenance, and monitoring of IT assets.

• Discover IT assets and map the CI topology: Utilize BMC Helix Discovery to identify IT assets, configurations, and associated attributes, establishing CI topological relationships across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Build service model for monitoring impact on business service health: Implement the robust features of BMC Helix AIOps to accelerate service model creation from discovered topological connections and assets, facilitating efficient monitoring of business service health and impacted assets during maintenance.
• Detect anomalies and generate timely alerts: Employ the capabilities of BMC Helix Operations Management to create monitoring policies for anomaly detection and the generation of timely alerts.
• Integrate third-party products and ingest data: Use BMC Helix Intelligent Integration connectors to incorporate third-party monitor applications and ingest event, metrics, and topology data.
• Manage incidents effectively: Utilize the features of BMC Helix ITSM to facilitate incident ticket creation and maintenance.
• Enable proactive service resolution and automation: Configure proactive service resolution in BMC Helix Intelligent Automation to automatically generate incident tickets and create and run remediation policies to resolve issues with problematic assets.
• Visualize and report on asset health: Leverage BMC Helix Dashboards to visualize asset inventory, asset health, and overall health status.

Asset discovery and reconciliation

• Discovering assets is a crucial initial step in the IT management strategy. Leverage and set up BMC Helix Discovery to automatically discover IT assets and resources, build topological relationships, gain insights into your IT landscape, create an accurate inventory, and understand asset configurations and dependencies. For more information, see Setting up and going live and Best practices for BMC Helix Discovery.

  

• Detecting anomalies and investigating performance metrics are key to understanding the behavior of your IT assets and resources. Start by collecting your system's performance and health data by deploying Knowledge Modules (KMs). Configure BMC PATROL Agent to help your system understand what data to collect. Configure monitoring policies in BMC Helix Operations Management. For more information, see Collecting data..

• Collecting and analyzing log data helps better understand an issue's root cause. Collect logs by using BMC Helix Log Analytics. For more information, see Collecting logs.

• Additionally, collecting events, metrics, and topology data from various BMC and third-party products is important to make accurate, informed, and data-driven decisions. Configure BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations to ingest data from third-party products. For more information, see Integrating by using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations.

• Building service models from the discovered assets gives a logical view of the IT assets and their relationships, making it easy to monitor asset health and perform root cause analysis in the service context. Create a business service in BMC Helix AIOps. Use the dynamic service modeling with blueprints capability to expedite the service model creation process. For more information, see Creating-service-blueprints and Creating-service-models.

• Monitoring the health of IT assets in a service

• Monitoring situations

• Predicting service outages

Incident creation and problem remediation

Furthermore, configuring the Proactive Service Resolution feature through BMC Helix Intelligent Automation gives you the power of automatic incident ticket creation in BMC Helix ITSM. This integration ensures that your IT support teams are promptly alerted to potential issues, allowing for proactive intervention and minimizing disruption to business operations. For more information, see Configuring Proactive Service Resolution for incidents.

By creating remediation policies, you can automatically remediate and fix the problems. For more information, see Managing automation policies

Visualization by using dashboards

The out-of-the-box Service Dashboard in BMC Helix Dashboards helps you visualize and analyze system health quickly. View the Service Dashboard to get a unified view of system health. For more information, see Viewing the Service Dashboard.

Additionally, you can create custom dashboards to track various KPIs and view metrics for selected assets that are part of a service. For more information, see Setting up dashboards.

Manage your IT assets with BMC

BMC offers complete lifecycle management of IT assets. Leverage BMC's asset management solution for complete asset lifecycle management and compliance, from procurement to retirement of your IT assets. Easily deploy and monitor your assets using the available integrations with multiple applications and processes. Automate asset discovery and relationship mapping through service models. In addition, track each asset's value and make informed decisions about asset upgrades and replacements.

For a comprehensive understanding of these capabilities and their benefits, see End-to-end asset management.