Investigating the service nodes from service hierarchy view

When a service is impacted, the service operators or site reliability engineers (SREs) need to have a complete visual representation of the service hierarchy. This hierarchical view is useful, especially, if the service design is dynamic and complex. 

The service hierarchy in BMC Helix AIOps is a schematic representation of the service structure with an ability to visualize the upstream and downstream hierarchy. This visualization helps the operators identify and investigate the node details, such as impacting events, incidents, changes, the first impact time and the latest update on the impact.

Related topics

Service-health-score-and-health-timeline

Monitoring-service-health

The service hierarchy visualization in BMC Helix AIOps makes the investigation of an impacted parent service or child services easier. The node details pane provides the total duration of the impact, total number of events, situations, incidents, or changes that might have caused the impact, and the latest timestamp of the update.

Scenario

At APEX Global IT, there is an E-Banking application service with two child services: Storage Services and Core-Banking-Infra. The Core-Banking-Infra service has Digital Payments as the child service. From the Services page, Susan, the operator, noticed that both E-Banking and Core-Banking-Infra are in a critical state.
Service_Hierarchy_EBanking_HeatMap_243.png

From the service details page, Susan navigates to the Service Hierarchy view to investigate the impacted service and child service. Viewing that she understands, the direct impact is on Core-Banking-Infra. E-Banking itself does not have any events. Impact on Core-Banking-Infra is propagated to E-Banking that impacts health score of E-Banking. The dotted line between Core-Banking-Infra and Digital Payments indicates that any impact on Digital Payments is not getting propagated to Core-Banking-Infra.

From the node details of each service, she analyzes details, such as the number of critical events, situations, incidents, or changes, that might have caused the impact and the total duration of the current impact. 

service_hierarchy_ebanking_scenario_24302.png  

To investigate the upstream and downstream impact of service nodes in a hierarchical view

  1. On the Services page, click a service name to view the health of and impact on the service.

  2. Click Service Hierarchy to view the service nodes for the parent and child services.

    Tip

    By default, when you click a service name, the CI Topology tab is displayed. To display the Service Hierarchy tab by default, open the tab, click the actions menu Actions Menu.jpg, and select Set as default view.

  3. Select a service node.
  4. (Optional) On the Node Details page, view the following details of the node:
    • Click individual tabs and select an event, situation, incident, or change listed to view and investigate the list of all impacting events, situations, incidents, and changes and their details.
      From the Event Details summary pane, you can launch BMC Helix Operations Management to analyze the complete event details.
    • Click Show All Attributes to view attributes of the node.
      These attributes are retrieved from the BMC Helix Discovery taxonomy.
  5. Click Upstream Hierarchy or Downstream Hierarchy or both to view the upstream (parent nodes) or downstream (child nodes) hierarchy of the service node.
  6. Click Open in new tab open_in_new_tab.png on a service node to view the service details in a new browser tab.
    For example, the following figure shows the topology of Storage Services after you click the tab: 
    OpenInNewTab_ServiceDetails_244.png   

  7. (Optional) Use the advanced filter options (Name, Kind, Status, and labels) to locate specific nodes or display a limited number of nodes in the service hierarchy.
    For example, if you want to view only technical services from the hierarchy, select     Advanced filter > Kind > Technical Service.

    Tip

    Based on the length of the selected criteria and the available space for displaying, the filters are automatically tagged and grouped as +1 active, +2 active, and so on. You can click the tagged number to view the additional filters.

  8. (Optional) Expand Analyze Root Cause to investigate the root cause of an issue.
    For example, you can investigate and understand whether the impact on the Core-Banking-Infra service affects the E-Banking service. For more information, see Performing-causal-analysis-of-impacted-services.


Where to go from here

Based on the health of and impact on a service, you can perform any of the following tasks: 

 

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