Ops Swarmer

Ops Swarmer, enabled by BMC HelixGPT, helps service desk agents and site reliability engineers (SREs) to resolve incidents in a more collaborative and efficient way directly from Microsoft Teams. With Ops Swarmer, you can initiate and manage incident-related chats, receive recommendations for relevant participants, and track real-time incident updates within Microsoft Teams.

Administrators can configure Ops Swarmer to support both BMC Helix ITSM and ServiceNow incidents through BMC Helix AIOps. By automating routine tasks and delivering intelligent, context-aware responses, Ops Swarmer reduces service desk workload and improves overall service management efficiency.

Watch the following video (2:45) showing an overview of the BMC Helix Ops Swarmer:

Overview of BMC Helix Ops Swarmer

Scenarios

Turn Microsoft Teams calls into ITSM‑tracked actions

At Apex Global, the IT operations team frequently schedules Microsoft Teams calls to resolve high-priority incidents. After one such call to troubleshoot a critical outage, a user prompts Ops Swarmer in Microsoft Teams chat to summarize the meeting. The goal is not just to create a meeting summary, but to convert the conversation into incident-specific, actionable insights.

Ops Swarmer retrieves the meeting transcript and writes a structured recap into the related incident’s activity log, including the participant list, key discussion points, and action items.

This makes the outcome visible within the BMC Helix ITSM system of record and helps all participants, including those who could not join the call, to review the key points and action items directly within the incident record. The team then uses the logged summary to track follow-up tasks until the incident is resolved.

Display incident information in a Microsoft Teams chat

Carl is a service desk agent at Apex Global, responsible for managing incident tickets and coordinating with various teams during outages and technical issues.

A major VPN outage affects remote employees across Europe, and Carl is assigned to the incident. He clicks the Start Ops Swarmer button to create a Microsoft Teams chat group, adds the core IT support and network administrators to the group, and clicks Launch Ops Swarmer to begin troubleshooting.

Maria, a security analyst, identifies a possible security concern related to the outage, and wants to join the chat. Maria has edit access to the incident. On the incident details page, she clicks the Request Ops Swarmer button.

Carl and the other group members receive an instant notification in Teams, and Carl approves Maria’s request with a single click. Maria is immediately added to the chat group and can contribute to the real-time discussion.

Retrieve information about the situations impacting a service to identify the root cause of the impact

Jim is a site reliability engineer at Apex Global, responsible for ensuring the IT infrastructure remains optimal, services remain healthy, and does not cause disruptions to the business. He starts his Monday by logging into Microsoft Teams. He opens the Ops Swarmer bot in Microsoft Teams and types: “Get me the list of situations for the Procurement service.” Instantly, Ops Swarmer responds with a detailed summary showing the status, severity, priority, and other key attributes of all critical situations.
Curious about one critical issue, Jim requests the situation summary, which helps him identify the root cause of the issue. Jim asks for a five-why analysis of the incident that is created for the situation and receives the top five root causes that caused the situation.

By using these insights, Jim continues the conversation with Ops Swarmer. Within minutes, he identifies the resolution plan, all without opening the BMC Helix AIOps console. This seamless workflow not only saves time but also empowers Jim to act faster, reducing MTTR and improving service reliability.

Process overview

The following flow chart explains the tasks required to configure Ops Swarmer:

Visual of the tasks required to configure Ops Swarmer

User roles and permissions

Make sure that you have the following roles and permissions to configure and use Ops Swarmer:

Product	Role	Permission	Description	Reference
BMC HelixGPT	HelixGPT Admin	Administrator	This role is required to configure Ops Swarmer and its skills in HelixGPT Agent Studio.	Roles and permissions Creating and assigning functional roles
Microsoft Azure	Microsoft Azure Admin	Microsoft Azure Administrator	This role is required to configure the Microsoft Teams bot and publish the application in the Microsoft Azure portal.	Microsoft Azure administrator roles and permissions
Microsoft Teams	Microsoft Teams Admin	Microsoft Teams Administrator	This role is required to create the Microsoft Teams bot and its application through Developer Portal in Microsoft Teams.	Microsoft Teams administrator roles and permissions

Agent type, skills, and models

Agent type: Supervisor
Out-of-the-box skill: Collaboration Agent, Collaboration Agent ServiceNow
Out-of-the-box prompts: No
For more information, see Out-of-the-box skills in BMC HelixGPT and Managing AI agents.
Models: For more information about supported models, see Models in BMC HelixGPT.

Before you begin

Make sure that the following prerequisites are met:

You have the appropriate license for using the following products. For more information about licensing, see BMC Helix Service Management service and BMC Helix AIOps service.
- BMC Helix Innovation Suite
- BMC Helix ITSM
- (Optional) BMC Helix AIOps
Microsoft Teams Azure account with a bot configured to interact with Ops Swarmer.
You have the appropriate license for Microsoft Teams Essential.

To set up Ops Swarmer

The following table lists the tasks to set up Ops Swarmer for BMC Helix and ServiceNow incidents:

Product	Tasks	Description	Reference
BMC Helix ITSM and AIOps	Set up Ops Swarmer for incidents collaboration.	Helps service desk agents and incident response teams to collaborate on incidents directly from Microsoft Teams.	Integrating BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix AIOps with Microsoft Teams for incident collaboration
BMC Helix AIOps	Set up Ops Swarmer for ServiceNow incidents collaboration.	Helps service desk agents and major incident teams to collaborate on ServiceNow incidents directly from Microsoft Teams.	Integrating BMC Helix AIOps with Microsoft Teams for ServiceNow incident collaboration

Where to go from here

The following table describes the tasks that you can perform by using Ops Swarmer:

Task	Description	Reference
Obtain recommendations for incident and service chats	Suggests the right experts to join incident or service conversations based on CI or service ownership, management, or support roles. Eliminates manual search; users can ask Ops Swarmer to recommend participants. Returns up to three recommendations per request in ServiceNow.	Obtaining participant recommendations from ServiceNow assets
Review the incident progress to identify delays and take corrective action	Provides a visual timeline of key incident milestones, including assignments, status changes, and resolution updates. Enables Ops Swarmers to quickly assess incident progress, pinpoint delays or bottlenecks, and identify areas needing attention. Improves decision-making and collaboration by offering a clear, consolidated view of how the incident has evolved from creation to resolution.	Viewing a visual timeline of incident milestones by using Ops Swarmer
Summarize Microsoft Teams calls	Streamlines incident collaboration by capturing and logging key details from live conversations. Generates concise summaries of discussions after voice calls and stores highlights in the related incident activity log. Improves accuracy, speed, and visibility in incident resolution by enabling updates with live meeting summaries directly from the agent.	Summarizing Microsoft Teams calls by using the BMC Helix Ops Swarmer agent
Display incident information in a Microsoft Teams chat	Helps resolve issues faster by bringing together the best response team and guiding them with insights. Helps ensure shared situational awareness by making AI Agent interactions visible to the entire team. Reduces context switching and administrative overhead, through automatic summarization of the chat.	Launching Ops Swarmer for collaboration
Update the incident Work Log from a Microsoft Teams chat	Saves time and effort by displaying the most up-to-date incident details in MS Teams. Brings helpful information into the chat by finding and displaying past similar incidents.	Launching Ops Swarmer for collaboration
Retrieve information about the situations impacting a service to identify the root cause of the impact	Saves time and effort by displaying intelligence about an outage summary and analysis in an MS Teams chat. Accelerates service restoration activities by recommending the best resolution actions.	Using the BMC Helix Ops Swarmer agent with Microsoft Teams to help resolve situations
Recommend participants who may be able to contribute in a chat	Makes accurate and timely recommendations on who should be invited to the swarm. Looks at the group support rosters in xMatters or PagerDuty to make sure that the participants on-call are invited.
Ask five whys, instead of five whats	Identifies the root cause of outages quickly by using AIOps intelligence to reduce time spent on analysis. Makes 5 Whys available to everyone in an MS Teams-based post-mortem chat for further discussion.

Learn more

To learn more about Ops Swarmer, see the following resources: