Service Modeling
Service modeling in BMC Helix AIOps
Service models are visualizations of services and the relationships between various logical components or CIs. Service models provide business context to the information within the service.
BMC Helix AIOps gives you multiple ways to define service models according to the logical construct that you want to build:
- Service blueprints: This modeling approach gives you complete control of the service composition. You can use both static and dynamic content to control the model composition.
- Start anywhere application modeling: This modeling approach enables you to choose any entry point into an application, Business Service, or Technical Service and begin modeling from there.
- A Business Application is a system that provides a business function to users or customers of the business. Applications generally involve multiple separate pieces of software such as application servers and databases, plus network services such as load balancers.
- A Business Service is a service that one business provides to another business. It also represents a service from one organization to another organization within a business. E-mail service, Enterprise resource planning (ERP), and order processing are examples of business services.
- Groups as services: This modeling approach gives you an option to define groups in BMC Helix Operations Management.
Modeling Groups as Services
Groups defined in BMC Helix Operations Management can be published as service models. As each group is a logical collection of monitored entities in BMC Helix Operations Management, you can model a group as a business service, publish it, and view and monitor in BMC Helix AIOps and BMC Discovery.
Roles and permissions to publish and view groups as services
- Only users with admin permissions in BMC Helix Operations Management can create groups and publish them as services.
Users with services > view permission in BMC Helix AIOps can view the published groups as services in the BMC Helix AIOps console. For more information on roles and permissions, see Roles and permissions in BMC Helix AIOps.
User with models > edit permissions in BMC Discovery can view the published groups as services (Rules) in the BMC Discovery console. For more information on roles and permissions, see Roles and permissions for BMC Helix Discovery using BMC Helix Portal.
If you want to create a new group to publish as a service or want some of the existing groups as service models, you can make use of this feature. Ensure that you have clearly understood the service models concepts and monitoring services using the BMC Helix AIOps console.
Advantage of publishing groups as service
Publishing groups as services helps organizations to leverage the group definitions to be mapped as service models. For example, Otto is an operator in APEX Global. Otto uses BMC Helix Operations Management to create and monitor groups, which is a logical collection of monitored entities. Otto thinks that if these groups can be published as service models, he can easily use the service monitoring feature in BMC Helix AIOps to monitor and manage these groups as services effectively.
Service blueprints
Blueprints are predefined service templates or building blocks to be readily used by organizations for defining services when creating service models. Service blueprints visually map out the steps in a service process and make it easier to design a new service or improve an existing service. The service blueprint plays a significant role in managing service operations, service design, and service positioning.
Service blueprints in BMC Helix AIOps, includes CIs that can be defined to have static or dynamic rules. Each node contains one or more CI Kinds interconnected to define a relationship. Based on your organization's need, you can define a blueprint to:
- Start with an application node, such as Namespace and the rest of the service containing one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an application to infrastructure map.
- Start with an infrastructure node, such as Host and the rest of the service containing one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an infrastructure to application map.
Example
Becky is a service designer at APEX Global. Betty is an operator who has to monitor and manage various business services such as datacenter operations at APEX Global.
Becky gets requests to create new services to manage the operations of her organization. While creating the service models to map these services, Becky realized that there are a few common processes that are part of each of these service models. For example, Kubernetes cluster service and virtual applications management service that are essential common basic services part of many other services, such as Kubernetes deployment, network availability monitoring, virtual datacenter operations, and so on.
In this example, the common basic services such as Kubernetes deployment, network availability monitoring, virtual datacenter operations can be defined as service blueprints.
CIs (Nodes) and CI Kind (Node kind)
- A node is an object to represent an entity in the environment discovered by the BMC Discovery datastore. Nodes can be connected to other nodes using relationships. Nodes have a kind, such as 'Host', and a number of named attributes. In BMC Helix AIOps, a node is a CI or component and a node can have a single or multiple kinds.
- A node kind is the type of a node, such as a Host or Software Instance. The default set of nodes and their named attributes and relationships are defined in the BMC Discovery taxonomy. A node kind can also have extended attributes. Though these attributes are not defined in the BMC Discovery taxonomy, they are used by some CIs in BMC Helix AIOps. Most node kinds have a key that uniquely identifies the entity in the environment. In BMC Helix AIOps, a node kind is known as CI Kind.