Performing probable cause analysis

To view the details of a service

1. In the BMC Helix Service Monitoring console, do one of the following actions to view the service details page:

1. • Click the Overview tab, and from the Services widget, click any of the impacted services whose details you want to view.
   • Click Entities and on the Services page, click an individual service tile.
     
     
     • Service name, severity, incident ID associated with the service, service impact score in percentage, and the date and time when the service was last updated.
     • Top 3 impacted business services that are associated with the service. In this example, ii_clm_cs_11 is the impacted business service associated with the ii_clm_bs11 service.
     • Pie chart displaying the count of open events impacting the service. The events are categorized by event status. The pie chart does not consider the INFO and OK events while displaying the event count.
     • Health score for the selected time range. Hover over a time slot to view the health score. For more information, see Service-health-score-impact-score-and-metrics.
     • Legends to indicate incidents, events, and change requests on the health timeline. Hover over an event, incident, or change request to view the details. For more information, see Total-incident-count-and-mean-time-to-resolve-MTTR-indicators-for-a-reliable-incidence-response-process. The health timeline does not display the INFO and OK events.

To view the probable causes of an impacted service

1. In the BMC Helix Service Monitoring console, do one of the following to view the probable causes of an impacted service:

1. • Click the Overview tab, and from the Services widget, click any of the impacted services whose details you want to view.
   • Click Entities and on the Services page, click an individual service tile.
2. On the individual service page, click Probable Cause.
3. From the Causal Nodes (% Probability), select a causal node to view the top causal events and changes for that node.
4. Do one of the following to view the event or change request details:

• • To view the events and event details:

  1. 
     
     1. Click Events to view top causal events. 
     2. Hover over the score to view the score calculation details for the event.

     3. Click on an event message link to view event details.

        Additional tabs for event details

        - Related Events tab displays only for a primary event. It contains correlation event details, such as event message, the impacted host, occurrence, severity, priority, and status.

        - Performance View tab displays only for an alarm class event. It contains the time-series data collected from key attributes of the causal events.

  
  

  • To view the change requests and details:

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     1. Select Changes to view top three change requests.
     2. Hover-over the score to view the score calculation details for the change.
     3. View the change request details.

To view the service topology

1. In the BMC Helix Service Monitoring console, do one of the following to view the service details page:

1. • Click the Overview tab, and from the Services widget, click any of the impacted services whose details you want to view.
   • Click Entities and on the Services page, click an individual service tile.

2. Click Topology. To know how to view and understand the service topology and its components, see:
   Visualizations toolset
   Information, zoom and undo/redo controls
   Note: The impacted node and the downstream path is marked in red color. Any non-impacted node is greyed out as shown in this image.

   

3. Click a node to view the node details as shown in this image.
   
4. (Optional) Click on an event, incident, or change to view event details, incident details, or change details.

To view the metrics of the causal node

1. In the BMC Helix Service Monitoring console, do one of the following to view the service details page:

1. • Click the Overview tab, and from the Services widget, click any of the impacted services whose details you want to view.
   • Click Entities and on the Services page, click an individual service tile.
2. Click Metrics to view the metrics chart for the top attributes of the causal node. If there are more than three metrics, only the top three trending metrics are displayed.
   Based on the metric data and its trend, you can take action to resolve the issue. For more information, see Service-health-score-impact-score-and-metrics.

Visualizations toolset

The following table lists the options you can use to manipulate a visualization and perform modeling tasks.