Ops Swarmer, enabled by BMC HelixGPT, helps service desk agents and site reliability engineers (SREs) to resolve incidents 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.
Ops Swarmer connects to sub-agents such Automation Collaborator to run triage and remediation actions to resolve the incidents. Automation Collaborator connects to third-party automation tools, such as Ansible and TrueSight Orchestration, and provides a wide range of remediation actions for incidents in BMC Helix ITSM.
To use Ops Swarmer, make sure the required product licenses are available. For more information, see BMC Helix Service Management service and BMC Helix AIOps service.
Watch the following video (2:45) showing an overview of the BMC Helix Ops Swarmer:
Overview of BMC Helix Ops Swarmer
Ops Swarmer capabilities
Ops Swarmer provides the following capabilities:
- Obtain recommendations for incident and service chats
- Review the incident progress to identify delays and take corrective action
- Summarize Microsoft Teams calls
- Display incident information in a Microsoft Teams chat
- Update the incident Work Log from a Microsoft Teams chat
- Retrieve information about the situations impacting a service to identify the root cause of the impact
- Recommend participants who may be able to contribute in a chat
- Ask five whys, instead of five whats
- Resolve incidents by performing triage and remediation actions through third-party automation tools such as Ansible Automation Platform and TrueSight Orchestration
To learn more about configuring Ops Swarmer, see Process to set up Ops Swarmer.
Scenarios
The following scenarios illustrate how Ops Swarmer can be used:
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.
Investigate an incident and perform triage and remediation actions to resolve the issue
Susan is a site reliability engineer at Apex Global who investigates an incident where a server is non‑compliant with the patch baseline.
She types "Give me the summary for INC000000000xxx" in the Ops Swarmer chat on Microsoft Teams, and gets incident details, determining missing patches and critical updates as the root cause of the issue.
Automation Collaborator suggests triage and remediation steps, such as checking for Linux packages on the host and deploying the missing patch for specific CVE IDs. Susan types, "Trigger the action to deploy the patch for CVE remediation using Ansible", and the agent asks her to specify the CVE ID for which the patch is to be deployed. After Susan confirms the required CVE ID, the system automatically installs the patches. It restarts the server, thus bringing the system back into compliance and resolving the incident end‑to‑end through collaboration.
Agent type, skills, and models
The Ops Swarmer supports the following agent types, skills, prompts, and supported models.
Agent type
- Supervisor: Monitors agent performance and conversation quality. It provides insights, suggests improvements, and ensures compliance with service standards.
Out-of-the-box skills
Out-of-the-box prompt
Supported models
User roles and permissions
Make sure that the following minimum roles are assigned:
| Product | Role | Description | Reference |
| BMC HelixGPT | HelixGPT Administrator | Configures Ops Swarmer and its skills in HelixGPT Agent Studio. | |
| Microsoft Azure | Microsoft Azure Administrator | Configures the Microsoft Teams bot and publishes the application in the Microsoft Azure portal. | Microsoft Azure administrator roles and permissions |
| Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams Administrator | Creates the Microsoft Teams bot and its application through Developer Portal in Microsoft Teams. | Microsoft Teams administrator roles and permissions |
| Microsoft Teams | - HelixGPT Administrator
- Microsoft Azure Administrator
- Microsoft Teams Administrator
| Enables the Ops Swarmer bot to securely access chats, manage participants, and generate AI-driven summaries within Microsoft Teams. | Permissions and data access for Ops Swarmer |
Process overview
The following flow chart explains the tasks required to configure Ops Swarmer:
Process to set up Ops Swarmer
The following table lists the tasks to set up Ops Swarmer for BMC Helix and ServiceNow incidents:
Ops Swarmer use cases
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.
|
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.
|
| Resolve incidents by performing triage and remediation actions through third-party automation tools such as Ansible Automation Platform and TrueSight Orchestration | - Based on the incident details, suggests triage and remediation actions by connecting to third-party automation tools.
- Depending on human input, performs the actions, and provides a detailed output about the success or failure of the actions.
| Remediating issues by using Ops Swarmer in Microsoft Teams |
Learn more
To learn more about Ops Swarmer, see the following resource:
Webinar: Helix Agentic AI in Teams - Ops Swarmer
