What can BMC Helix Network Management monitor
BMC Helix Network Management can monitor, display, and alert on an enormous range of activity of devices and services in your network environment. For a list of supported vendors and device types, see Supported Devices.
Monitoring the following is at the core of BMC Helix Network Management’s operation.
Host Availability
Each managed device is continuously checked for network availability. BMC Helix Network Management immediately reports on host outages. Additionally, rather than flood you with redundant alerts about every downed host in a network hierarchy, BMC Helix Network Management sends only alert notifications about the highest-level downed host responsible for unreachable child devices through the use of its incident management feature.
Host Services Availability
BMC Helix Network Management can monitor any service or other application on any host to ensure that it is available on the network and properly responds to requests through the use of service checks. BMC Helix Network Management service checks are multistage to make sure that a service really is failing (and not just experiencing a momentary interruption) before sending any alerts.
Host Performance
BMC Helix Network Management continuously collects and records a variety of standard statistics for each host based on its device type. Graphs charting the historical values for each statistic are available on each device's Device Dashboard. Many additional statistics may also be collected through the use of device subtypes, including statistics for MSSQL, Oracle, and Active Directory.
Threshold checks may be added to a host to actively monitor any collected statistics for unacceptable values (high and low using static and dynamic threshold values) and alert you to them. Anomaly (dynamic) thresholds are particularly useful for detecting anomalous activity during otherwise regularly expected spikes or dips in resource usage (such as weekends or holidays).
Device Configurations
BMC Helix Network Management's Config Manager continuously monitors all devices to which it has log in access for changes made to the internal configuration of that device. If a configuration change is detected, BMC Helix Network Management sends you a notification alerting you to exactly what those changes were and then automatically downloads and archives each changed configuration so that previous ones can be restored, if necessary.
At any time, you can easily view all configuration changes for a device in a timeline, calendar, or list view. Previously downloaded configurations from any date can even be compared to the current one in a special context-sensitive editor that visually highlights the differences between them.
Web Application Performance
Websites and other web-based applications can be monitored for availability and application response time (ART) with WebART checks. Through the use of synthetic monitoring, BMC Helix Network Management can replicate behavioral paths that typical users might take while using your web application and provide a breakdown of the responsiveness of each path segment (including DNS and TCP times). These checks can be performed from a service engine to evaluate an application’s performance from a region other than that of the BMC Helix Network Management server.
Email Application Performance
Similar to the web application check above, BMC Helix Network Management's EmailART check monitors the availability and performance of an email server. This type of check also doubles as an "Internet availability" check, ensuring that your network is properly connected to the outside world.
Cloud and Virtual Environment Resources
BMC Helix Network Management provides you with in-depth visibility into your virtual environments and supports a variety of virtualization management consoles. Additionally, it is capable of actively monitoring many cloud-based services such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Cisco Meraki. A variety of virtual statistics are available, including host I/O and resource usage.