Integrating with TrueSight Operations Management

The TrueSight Operations Management product proactively detects and automatically resolves IT performance issues and sub optimal configurations before users and services are negatively impacted. Alerts are generated for any events or changes that occur in the environment. Typically, alerts are generated even for intentional changes related to the infrastructure, for example, a CI that is unavailable due to a scheduled maintenance, causing unnecessary action to resolve these issues.

The integration of Change Management with TrueSight Operations Management allows you to configure event notification parameters so that alerts are not generated for events due to planned changes to a CI or a service.

The current integration enables you to perform the following actions:

Configure TrueSight Operations Management to receive notifications for Change Event types (Change event or Task event or both) that occur on SIEM enabled CI Types.
Notify TrueSight Operations Management of:
- CIs for which a change is planned or occurred in the past, but logged now.
- Change Task events for the tasks related to CIs.
Manage errors and queue undelivered events.
Send automatic email notification to preconfigured TrueSight Operations Management and Change Management application administrators in case of errors.
Use secured communication channels.

Integration requirements

For the integration to work seamlessly, the following tasks must be completed:

Install Action Request System. During installation, select the Web Services Plug-In option.
Install BMC Helix CMDB. During installation, select the Web Services Registry option to ensure that UDDI is installed. Go to AR System Administration Console > System > General > Server Information > WS Registry integration > Registry location and verify that the UDDI server details are updated.
For more information, see in the Installing BMC Helix Innovation Suite deployment documentation.
Install BMC Helix ITSM. Ensure that you install the Change Management and the Asset Management applications.
For more information, see Installing in the BMC Helix Innovation Suite deployment documentation.
Install the BMC Helix CMDB extensions required for the integration. For more information, see Configuring BMC Atrium CMDB integration.
Register the CAI_ChangeManagementEventsSubscription_WS web service, which is required to enable the Change Management and TrueSight Operations Management integration. For more information about how to register a web service, see Registering, modifying, and de-registering web services.
Install TrueSight Operations Management.

To verify that the integration is active

Go to Application Administration Console > Custom Configuration > Change Management > Advanced Options and verify that the Change CI Event Notification to BPPM option is available.

Integration overview

Each instance of TrueSight Operations Management provides a single access point that must be registered, configured, and activated for Change Management. When event notification is enabled, Change Management sends all subscribed change events to the configured TrueSight Operations Management instance.

TrueSight Operations Management can use these notifications to define their blackout policies, so that no alerts are sent out for planned change events that cause down time.

Important

Integration is activated when TrueSight Operations Management subscribes to Change Management events in one of the following ways:

If Change Management is already installed, TrueSight Operations Management integrates and subscribes to Change Management events automatically during installation. The subscription is activated when you run TrueSight Operations Management.
If Change Management is not installed during the installation of TrueSight Operations Management, install Change Management, and execute the following command on the TrueSight Operations Management Server to activate the subscription:
pw itsm_cm activate -reason <Integration_Status_Change_Reason>
[-email_addrs <semi-colon(;) separated email address>]

How the integration works

To understand how the integration works, consider the following scenario:

Jim is a network operations center (NOC) operator at a company that has multiple monitoring tools for its IT environment. The monitoring tools generate events for all changes that occur in the environment. Due to lack of communication between users who introduce these changes and the NOC operators, the NOC operators end up troubleshooting events generated by known change requests, wasting time and resources.

The integration of Change Management with TrueSight Operations Management allows Jim to reduce the number of events generated by changes introduced in the environment. The integration allows him to automatically block and notify users of any change including:

Blackouts (unplanned or emergency changes)
Scheduled maintenance (planned changes)
Any change to devices, services, or applications (start and end of changes) including configuration changes. For example, the users are notified that a patch would be applied to a device that they use.

For example, Roger, the distributed server operations user, requests Rahul, the Change Coordinator, to schedule a security patch update for selected servers.

Jim has configured an automated CI blackout policy for change requests received through BMC Helix ITSM. This policy performs the following tasks:

Marks all events occurring in the scheduled time period for that CI to blackout
Automatically schedules downtime in TrueSight Operations Management for change requests received through BMC Helix ITSM.
Stops data collection
Stops alarms and abnormalities generation
Sets CI to maintenance mode

Becky, the Event and Impact Management Service Model administrator, requests that the status of CIs change to Scheduled Downtime in the Service Model.

For this use case, the following procedure is followed:

Roger contacts Rahul about scheduling maintenance of the selected group of servers to apply the latest security patches.
Rahul schedules the server for the maintenance 2 weeks from the date of the request for 5 hours.
Jim receives an event in the TrueSight Operations Management GUI notifying him of the upcoming maintenance. He also receives a notification that the Cell Blackout Policy and PNET downtime schedule was created.
When the date of maintenance arrives, the event status is modified in the TrueSight Operations Management GUI to notify Jim of that fact that now the designated servers are down for scheduled maintenance. He also sees that all events received from the CIs that represent the servers that are now in maintenance are set to blackout state.
Becky sees that the CIs status representing servers is changed to Blackout in the Service Model.
When at the end of the scheduled down period, the change request is marked as completed, Jim observes that the event status is modified to Completed and validates that the Blackout Policy and TrueSight Operations Management Schedule downtime are removed. Events received for the CIs reflect the actual state of the CIs. Jim also receives Event Status Closed for the event that was originally generated from the change request.
Becky observes that CIs status is back to Normal state in the Service Model.

To manage Change Management event subscriptions

After TrueSight Operations Management subscribes to change management events, change users with the Infrastructure Change Config permission can view and modify some configuration information in Change Management. This section describes the configuration options available for publishing Change Management events.

Select Application Administration > Application Administration Console > Custom Configuration > Change Management > Advanced Options > Change CI Event Notification to BPPM.
On the Change Event Publication tab:
- Yes indicates that publishing of Change Management events to TrueSight Operations Management is active.
- No indicates that publishing of Change Management events to TrueSight Operations Management is inactive.
Enter the email IDs of the users to whom notifications should be sent in the Error Notification Email ID (s) field. Error notifications can be sent to multiple change users. Separate multiple email addresses using a semicolon.
The TrueSight Operations Management Subscription details are available on the BPPM Subscription tab. The following details are populated after subscription:
- TrueSight Operations Management Instance Name—The name of the TrueSight Operations Management instance provided at the time of subscription.
- Activation Status—The integration status that the TrueSight Operations Management server sends to Change Management. The status can have the following values:
  - Active—The TrueSight Operations Management instance is active and ready to receive Change Management events.
  - Inactive—The TrueSight Operations Management instance is inactive and is not receiving the Change Management events.
    For more information about status and event notifications and queues, see Event-notifications-and-queues.
- BPPM Web Service Access User Management—This section provides authentication details required by Change Management to publish change management events to TrueSight Operations Management.
  Important
  The default user ID and password to access the TrueSight Operations Management web services to send events is provided out of the box. However, if the user authentication details are modified, the details must be manually updated in this configuration screen.
- (Optional) To check the connectivity to TrueSight Operations Management, click Test Connection.
  Based on the success or failure of the connection, the appropriate success message or reason for failure error message is displayed.
After required configuration information has been updated, click Save.

Event notifications and queues

Depending on the status of the TrueSight Operations Management integration and the change event publication, events are either sent or queued.

The following table describes the behavior of the Change Management and TrueSight Operations Management integration:

TrueSight Operations Management Integration status	Change event publication status	Action
Active	Yes	Change events are sent.
Inactive	No	No change events are sent.
Suspended	Yes	Change events are queued.

The TrueSight Operations Management integration status is set to Suspended when TrueSight Operations Management is inactive for known reasons. Queued events are sent when TrueSight Operations Management is active again. A maximum queue size is configured. For more information on queue size, see Defining command parameters .

Escalations are run every hour to verify the queue size, and if it exceeds the defined max queue size, the change subscription is deactivated and an email notification is sent to the TrueSight Operations Management administrator and the Change Management administrator.

In case of errors, an email notification is sent to the TrueSight Operations Management administrator and the Change Management administrator. The email includes a link to the error report.