Collecting data
As an administrator, your goal is to ensure system availability for your users. To do this you need current and accurate data about the performance and health of your system. When you use BMC Helix Operations Management to monitor your infrastructure system, data collection is one of the initial activities that takes place. After you install the repository that contains PATROL Agents and knowledge modules (KM), BMC Helix Operations Management is ready to collect data for monitoring. Data is the information that is collected by BMC Helix Operations Management from your environment, such as the databases that your system uses or the operating systems in use.
BMC Helix Operations Managementcollects data on the basis of monitor policies. You can configure monitor policies to help your system understand what data to collect.
BMC Helix Operations Management supports Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF)-based data collection. This feature provides real-time visibility into system activity, network communication, and container behaviour without requiring any changes to the application. BMC Helix Operations Management integrates with modern schedulers and orchestrators, such as Kubernetes, and ingests data through OpenTelemetry pipelines, BMC Helix collectors, and other tools, such as Cribl.
As an administrator, collect data from monitored environments as explained in the following image and table:
Task | Action | Role | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Begin data collection by planning your monitoring requirements. Decide what environments you want to monitor and in those environments what information you want to monitor. For example, you want to monitor CPU and memory utilization of your Windows operating systems. | Administrator or Operator | Creating and deploying packages - List of available KMs section |
2 | Based on the information that you plan to monitor, create a deployable package. A deployable package contains a combination of a PATROL Agent and/or KMs. When you create the package for the first time, it must contain the PATROL Agent. In the future, the package might only contain KMs. All KMs are bundled into a repository. Important: Use PATROL Agent 20.08 or later. | Administrator | Creating and deploying packages |
3 | Next, deploy the package that installs its components. When you deploy the package with the PATROL Agent, the agent is added to the Agents page where you can manage agents and perform actions like restarting or reloading them. | Administrator | Creating and deploying packages |
4 | After the packages are deployed, configure the KM how to connect to the environment that you want to monitor and what information to collect. For this purpose, create monitoring policies for all the KMs that you have deployed. Administrators can manage monitoring policies by using REST APIs. | Administrator | |
5 | When you have configured monitoring policies, the KM starts sending data to BMC Helix Operations Management. You can view the collected data on the Monitoring > Devices page. Devices are created with the same name as the PATROL Agent that collects data. Administrators can manage metric and event data by using REST APIs, | Administrator or Operator |
In addition, you can import events by using the following applications:
BMC Helix Developer Tools: Uses a Fluentd-based framework for integration with BMC and third-party products to ingest event, CI, and topology data for monitoring in BMC Helix AIOps. It enables you to build custom integrations for the third-party products for which out-of-the-box integrations are not available, and collects logs from files. For more information, see Integrating by using BMC Helix Developer Tools.
BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations: Uses REST APIs and Webhook mechanism for integration with BMC and third-party products to ingest event, CI, and topology data for monitoring in BMC Helix AIOps. It provides a click-and-connect capability to configure an integration. For more information, see Integrating by using BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations.
- Event APIs: Enable you to collect event data from third-party applications. For more information, see Event management endpoints in the REST API.
What to do next
Create alarm policies to set thresholds. Alarm policies monitor and manage the health of your system and safeguard against abnormalities. For more information, see the following topics: