Investigating the service nodes from service hierarchy view
When a service is impacted, service operators or site reliability engineers (SREs) need 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 operators identify and investigate node details, including impacting events, incidents, changes, the first impact time, and the latest update on the impact.
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, the 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.
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.
To investigate the upstream and downstream impact of service nodes in a hierarchical view
- On the Services page, click a service name to view the health of and impact on the service.
Click Service Hierarchy to view the service nodes for the parent and child services.
- Select a service node.
- (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.
- 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.
- Click Upstream Hierarchy or Downstream Hierarchy or both to view the upstream (parent nodes) or downstream (child nodes) hierarchy of the service node.
- Click Open in new tab
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:
(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.- (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.
Impact of health propagation on service health computation
Understanding how propagation is configured and represented in the service hierarchy ensures accurate root-cause analysis and helps operators focus on the services that are actually impacted.
Health propagation determines how service impact is reflected during investigation. By default, the health of child services is propagated to their parent service, and issues in child services affect the health score and health status of the parent service.
In the service hierarchy view, the relationship between services visually indicates whether health propagation is enabled:
- A solid line between a child service and a parent service indicates that health propagation is enabled. The impact on the child service contributes to the parent service health score.
- A dotted line between a child service and a parent service indicates that health propagation is disabled for that relationship. The impact on the child service does not contribute to the parent service health score.
When health propagation is disabled for a parent service or for a specific child‑to‑parent relationship, the parent service can appear healthy even if one or more child services are impacted. This behavior is intentional and helps prevent non‑critical or isolated issues from affecting higher‑level services.
When investigating service impact:
- Check the line style between child and parent services to determine whether health propagation is enabled.
- If the parent service is not directly impacted and its health score is derived from a child service, the health score is marked as (Propagated).
Example
In the service hierarchy, if Shipping is connected to Internal reporting by a dotted line, any issue in Internal reporting does not affect the health score of Shipping.
The Billing and Payment service has a solid line to the Order Processing service; any issue in Billing and Payment affects the health score of Order Processing.
Where to go from here
Based on the health of and impact on a service, you can perform any of the following tasks:
- View CI topology for impacted services. For more information, see Identifying-the-impacted-CI-nodes-from-CI-topology-view.
- View health indicators for an impacted service. For more information, see Monitoring-service-health-indicators.
- View the causal analysis for the impact. For more information, see Performing-causal-analysis-of-impacted-services.
- Get an insight into the service behavior and its severity pattern over a pre-defined period. For more information, see Monitoring-service-insights.