Monitoring situations

Related topics

As an operator or a site reliability engineer (SRE), use situations to quickly identify, assess, and investigate issues detected in your environment.

You can use the Situations page to:

Monitor active and historical situations
Identify critical situations based on severity and priority
Drill down into situation details for investigation

To learn more about situations in BMC Helix AIOps, see Situations overview.

Options on the Situations page

On the BMC Helix AIOps console, click Situations and use the following options to control how situations are displayed:

UI option	Description
	Use the date and time filter to view situations based on the selected period. By default, all situations that occurred in the last 24 hours are displayed.
	Click to refresh the page. By default, the Situations page is automatically refreshed after every five minutes. The automatic refresh interval applies to active browser sessions. If you navigate to another browser tab or application and then return to the original page, it is refreshed immediately and displays the current state of the system's health. After this refresh, the auto-refresh timeout starts based on the configured interval. The tab or browser sessions are not automatically refreshed if the Auto Refresh Interval option is set to Off. To change the refresh interval duration, see User interface overview.
	If you select a preset on the Services page, the situations related to the services filtered by the preset are displayed. For example, if you select a preset to view the critically impacted services, all situations related to the critical services are displayed. You can select any option from the list of available presets to view the situations based on your selection. If you select another preset and navigate to the Services page, services filtered by the selected preset are displayed.
	Save the selected advanced filters as a preference. You can save your preferences when editing or resetting advanced filters. The preferences are saved for the logged-on user until they are updated.
	Type the name of the situation or the service (case-insensitive) and click Search . If you search by using the service name, all situations impacting the situation are displayed.
	Use the filter to view situations based on the status, severity, priority, and type. By default, all situations with the status Open, Acknowledged, Assigned, and of the severity Critical, Major, Minor, Warning, and Information for the last 24 hours are displayed. Apply filters to view situations with the status Blackout and Closed. Important: When you click Apply filter, the selected filters are retained across the list view and tile view until your session expires or you manually refresh the page.
	Click Similar Situations to view groups of similar situations that occurred in the last 24 hours (default).
	Switch to the tile view to view all situations as tiles with an option to investigate a situation. By default, all independent, primary, and similar situations are displayed in a hierarchical view. The hierarchical and tile views are available only for All Situations.
	Click the option to select the columns to be displayed in the selected view. By default, all columns are displayed.

Viewing situation information

On the BMC Helix AIOps console, click Situations.
By default, all situations with the status Open, Acknowledged, Assigned, and of severity Critical, Major, and Minor are displayed in the hierarchical view. Presets available on the Services page are also available on the Situations page. If you select a preset on the Services page, the situations related to the services filtered by the preset are displayed.

The following table describes key situation UI options that require additional explanation or have a conditional behavior. The UI options that are self-explanatory and visible directly in the UI are not described here:

UI option	Description
Number of related situations	Displayed for only primary situations.
Number of related events	Displayed for only independent situations.
Severity and priority	BMC Helix AIOps evaluates all events, causal and child events, correlated into the situation, and assigns the highest severity found among those events to the situation. If multiple events have the highest severity, the situation’s priority is set to the highest priority among those events. For more information, see How situation severity and priority are determined. The original causal event might or might not determine the final severity and priority. The causal event determines the root cause assignment, but the severity and priority of the situation are determined by evaluating all events that form the situation. Situation severity and priority are determined from the highest-severity event only when the situation-severity parameter is set to priority-from-highest-severity value in the situations_configurations/search API, and the Multi-service Situations feature is enabled. For more information, see Configuring ML-based situations and Managing situations by using REST APIs.
Automations	Displayed if the Intelligent Automations feature is enabled from the Manage Product Features page under Configurations. For more information, see Enabling AIOps features.

To investigate an independent, primary, or multi-service situation, click the situation name. The situation details page is displayed, which helps you investigate a situation.
- For a primary situation, expand the situation group and view the related situations.
  The icon indicates that it's a root cause situation. The name of the primary situation is the same as the root cause situation. There can be multiple root cause situations under a primary situation.
(Optional) Perform actions on a situation, such as acknowledging it and assigning an owner.

Viewing similar situation information

On the BMC Helix AIOps console, click Similar Situations.
By default, situations with the status Open, Acknowledged, Assigned, and stabilized ML-based situations that are grouped by the similarities in message, impact, and node ID are displayed. Similar situations always appear in a list view.

UI option	Description
Automations	Displayed if the Intelligent Automations feature is enabled from the Manage Product Features page under Configurations. For more information, see Enabling the AIOps features.

To investigate similar situations, perform any of the following actions:
- Expand the situation group.
  All historical occurrences of a situation, both open and closed, irrespective of the selected advanced filter and time, are displayed.
- Click a situation to investigate the details. Alternatively, right-click the situation name to view the situation details in a new tab or a new window, and retain the existing situations list.
(Optional) Perform actions on a situation, such as acknowledging the situation and assigning the owner.
For more information, see Performing situation actions.

How situation severity and priority are determined

Use the following table to understand how BMC Helix AIOps determines the severity and priority of a situation based on the severities and priorities of its correlated events.

Scenario	Causal event severity and priority	Child events severity and priority	Situation severity and priority	Explanation
Situation severity is based on the highest-severity event	Major, P3	Critical, P2	Critical, P2	A child event has higher severity than the causal event, so the situation inherits the highest severity and corresponding priority.
Causal event drives severity only when it is the highest	Critical, P2	None higher	Critical, P2	The causal event has the highest severity among all events, so it determines the situation's severity and priority.
Priority is determined from the highest-severity events	–	Critical, P3	Critical, P3	A child event has the highest severity, so the situation inherits severity and priority from that event.
Mixed priorities among the highest-severity events	–	Critical, P2 and Critical, P3	Critical, P2	Multiple events have the highest severity; the situation’s priority is set to the highest priority among those events.
Incident priority is the same as situation priority	Any	Any	Same as the situation	Any incident created from the situation inherits the situation’s severity and priority.

Where to go from here

Click an ML-based or policy-based situation to investigate and remediate the situation: