ServiceOps overview
ServiceOps is the combination of IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). It unifies people, processes, and technology platforms that are highly interdependent. These entities must operate in parallel to make sure that services are delivered effectively, and infrastructure operations are free of incidents. By unifying the entities, ServiceOps improves user experience and service delivery through real-time visibility, automation, and intelligent collaboration across siloed ITSM and ITOM teams.
ServiceOps combines ITSM and ITOM, driven by AI/ML to streamline and automate IT processes. It uses the following key components for proactive, collaborative operations:
- AI Agents: Enable autonomous detection, resolution, and prevention of issues.
- Open integrations: Connect ITOM and ITSM seamlessly with various SaaS or on-premises monitoring tools, such as Dynatrace and Prometheus to collect data from them.
- Common data stores: Store data collected from ITSM and ITOM and make it available for analysis and decision making.
- Common services: Deliver reusable functions and components for ITOM and ITSM teams.
- Open APIs: Offer standardized interfaces for system extension and integration.
- Integration services: Link workflows, processes, and systems across ITSM and ITOM.
Benefits of ServiceOps
ServiceOps uses AI, observability, and automation to improve service quality, reduce downtime risks, and enhance productivity and efficiency across teams. It offers many benefits, such as:
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ServiceOps reduces risk to the business by analyzing and predicting the contextual risk of the vulnerabilities and proposed changes. It uses AI-powered root cause analysis and contextual topology to diagnose issues faster. |
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ServiceOps improves service quality by understanding the service health and their dependencies, and the change impact across applications, infrastructure, and network. |
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ServiceOps improves service reliability by continuously monitoring service health and automatically triggering remediation workflows to prevent incidents or reduce their impact. |
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ServiceOps improves operational efficiency by correlating changes and incidents to situations. It also enables collaborative incident response through tools such as MS Teams with AI-generated summaries. |
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ServiceOps facilitates seamless collaboration between ITOM and ITSM teams by combining observability, automation, and AI into a unified platform. |
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ServiceOps boosts the productivity of ITOM and ITSM teams by using AI agents, such as Service Collaborator and Change Risk Advisor, to streamline investigations, suggest fixes, and enable proactive operations. |
Reduces risk
Improves service quality
Improves service reliability
Increases operational efficiency
Facilitates seamless collaboration
Boosts productivityKey capabilities of ServiceOps
With ServiceOps, teams work together to proactively identify incidents before they impact end users and mitigate them.
The key capabilities of ServiceOps are:
- BMC HelixGPT-driven situation management: Recommends the most effective actions to resolve a situation by using the Best Action Planner AI agent.
- Collaboration by using Microsoft Teams: Helps investigate and resolve situations faster without leaving the Microsoft Teams interface by using the AI agents, such as BMC Helix Ops Swarmer and AIOps Chat Agent.
- Discovery of IT assets and dynamic service modeling: Discovers IT assets and their relationships and helps you to create service models that depict how these assets together deliver a business service. It combines observability data from monitoring tools with service context to understand what caused an issue and which services are dependent on the affected assets.
- Embedded dashboards and service health timeline: Provides dashboards with metrics, logs, and topology that help teams monitor and drill down without switching applications. In addition, a visual timeline shows how a service’s health has changed over time, and correlates those changes with incidents, changes, and anomalies.
- Probable cause analysis: Identifies the root cause faster by correlating changes to incidents and continuously monitoring the impact of changes by using the service health timeline and a reconciled topology that maps IT assets, service dependencies, and relationships.
- Change risk analysis: Simulates the impact of proposed changes in a service context by using an AI agent, for example, Change Risk Advisor. The agent analyzes risks in advance to avoid making changes that are likely to cause an incident.
- Incident to situation correlation: Reduces incident noise by creating a single incident in BMC Helix ITSM for a situation (correlated events) through automation.
- Automated remediation: Minimizes manual intervention and triggers automated remediation workflows.
ServiceOps implementation overview
Implementing ServiceOps requires a strategic transformation that combines people, processes, and technology. The following steps provide an overview of the tasks that you need to perform to implement ServiceOps:
Step 1: Define the objectives
Set clear, result-oriented objectives for ServiceOps that both ITSM and ITOM teams can align to. The objectives might include reduced MTTR, faster incident resolution time, or reduced event or incident noise.
Step 2: Assess the current maturity level
Evaluate the existing ITSM processes, ITOM capabilities, tools, and integrations to understand your baseline. Identify the gaps in visibility, collaboration, and automation to identify improvement areas.
Step 3: Identify the use cases and tools
Identify the use cases and the ITOM and ITSM tools or products, such as change management and service desk management, required to achieve the use cases. After identifying the tools, define the workflows for incident management, change management, and other processes, and make sure that the data flows seamlessly into the incident management system. Integrate monitoring tools, a real-time CMDB, and service desk management systems to provide end-to-end visibility into the workflows between ITOM and ITSM.
Step 4: Build cross-functional teams
Build a team with members from both ITOM and ITSM teams, such as incident managers, automation engineers, and change managers. Share common KPIs, such as MTTR, service health, and incident resolution speed, to keep the teams aligned with the objectives. Provide the required training to the teams.
Step 5: Facilitate collaboration and share dashboards
Provide shared dashboards that display real-time service health, incidents, and root cause analysis in a single view. Integrate with collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams so that ITOM and ITSM teams can collaborate and coordinate.
Step 6: Monitor and improve
Continuously track KPIs, analyze patterns, and adjust rules, automation logic, and processes over time. The iterative approach makes sure that ServiceOps evolves with business needs. Implement monitoring and automation features to streamline workflows and improve incident management.
Use cases
The following use cases help you learn more about achieving value with ServiceOps offered by BMC Helix:
| Use case | Business value | User | Products used |
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| Automate incident creation with Proactive Service Resolution | Automate the creation of incidents from events and ML-based situations, bridging IT operations and service desk teams. With the automated approach, you no longer have to manually create incidents. As a result, you spend less time on repetitive tasks, avoid errors, resolve issues faster, and keep services running smoothly. For more information, see Creating incidents in BMC Helix IT Service Management for events. | Tenant Administrator Operator Automation Engineer Service desk agent | BMC Helix Intelligent Automation BMC Helix AIOps BMC Helix ITSM |
| Reduce incident noise in BMC Helix ITSM by using Proactive Service Resolution | Reduce incident noise significantly by creating consolidated incidents for correlated events (ML-based situations). With a reduced volume of incidents, you can concentrate on identifying and addressing the root cause. The single incident created in BMC Helix ITSM contains details such as the causal configuration item (CI), names of the impacted services, and a direct URL to view the situation in BMC Helix AIOps. The details help you perform a faster root cause analysis of the problem and resolve it to restore the health of your infrastructure. For more information, see Reducing incident noise in BMC Helix ITSM by using Proactive Service Resolution. | Tenant administrator Operator Automation engineer Service desk agent | BMC Helix Intelligent Automation BMC Helix AIOps BMC Helix ITSM |
| Reduce event noise during blackout windows | Reduce the event noise during planned maintenance windows or known periods of change by using the Blackout Policy solution. The solution automatically creates blackout policies based on a scheduled change request created in BMC Helix ITSM. If a change request is updated, the blackout policy is updated automatically. By using the automated solution, you can save the time and effort required to manually create and maintain blackout policies in BMC Helix Operations Management. For more information, see Overview of Proactive Service Resolution. | Tenant administrator Operator Automation engineer Service desk agent Change manager | BMC Helix Intelligent Automation BMC Helix Operations Management BMC Helix ITSM |
| Make informed decisions with ML-based change risk assessment | Proactively evaluate the risk associated with planned changes before implementation. The cognitive risk assessment predicts the risk factors associated with a change request based on similar change requests implemented in the past. By using AI-driven insights, historical data, and contextual analysis, the change risk assessment helps you accurately predict the likelihood of change failure or service disruption. The assessment results in more informed decision-making, reduced change-related incidents, and fewer service outages. For more information, see Assessing the risk of a change request. | Tenant administrator Operator Service desk agent Change manager | BMC Helix AIOps BMC Helix ITSM |
| Accelerate incident resolution with probable cause analysis | Speed up incident resolution by using AI/ML to identify the most likely root cause of service disruptions. The system analyzes alerts, logs, and metrics to identify the most probable root cause, eliminating the need for manual data review. Identification of the root cause reduces MTTR, minimizes business impact, and improves service availability. For more information, see Probable cause analysis in Incident Management by using BMC Helix Service Monitoring. | Tenant administrator Operator Service desk agent Change manager | BMC Helix AIOps BMC Helix ITSM |