Setting up and running queries

An organization can better manage IT infrastructure incidents by automatically assigning a Configuration Item (CI) to an incident while saving time and effort. An organization can automate the management of IT infrastructure incidents while saving time and effort that goes into manually searching and assigning CI to an incident.

By leveraging class query mapping, you achieve the following benefits:

  • Automatically associates a CI with an incident for efficient tracking.
  • Helps incident managers identify the probable cause quickly.
  • Saves time and effort, enabling faster incident resolution.


Example

The Apex Global Services company needs to automatically identify and assign a CI to an incident.

Consider a scenario where one of the servers in the IT infrastructure is not responding. This outage impacts the Payroll application and slows down the consumer banking service. Before users begin calling in to report a problem, the server failure must be discovered, communicated to the service desk, diagnosed, and resolved.

BMC Helix Integration Service creates an incident with CI lookup and passes it to BMC Helix ITSM. BMC Helix ITSM then passes these queries as a CMDB REST API to CMDB. If the query is complex, the predefined complex queries that are mapped to various classes by default in the CMDB Class Query Mapping are used by the REST API to perform the search for the CI. The CI that is returned from this search is assigned to the incident.

The Class Query Mapping in BMC Helix CMDB maps complex queries to classes so that when a complex search REST API is requested, it can use these mapped queries to conduct a search within that class.


The following image shows a high-level overview of the workflow for using query mapping:

Class query mapping.png

  1. A monitoring tool through integration sends an incident with CI lookup to BMC Helix ITSM.
    For BMC Helix ITSM to be able to access to CMDB, you must first perform the procedure as described in Providing-ITSM-with-access-to-CMDB.
  2. If it is a simple lookup, BMC Helix ITSM sends it to CMDB and finds the CI.
  3. BMC Helix ITSM returns the incident along with that CI.
  4. If an exact match for the CI is not found in CMDB, a complex search is performed.
  5. CMDB REST API performs the complex lookup using the default class queries mapping in CMDB, and returns a CI.
  6. BMC Helix ITSM associates the CI with the incident.


Refer to the following documentation to see the different scenarios in which you may want to set up and run queries:

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*