Best Practices for BMC Helix ITSM Insights

We recommend that you review best practices for the BMC Helix ITSM Insights product prior to implementing a product or a feature.

Best practices for proactive problem management

We recommend the following best practices for proactive problem management:

• Select incidents for a specific duration to avoid unnecessary incidents getting clustered.
• As issues for each product or service are different,  select an appropriate Group by level 1 field based your organization structure, service ownership, technical stack ownership, or other defining fields.
• For better quality clusters with clear boundaries, we recommend adding Group by fields. Following are some of the common fields used for grouping:
  • Service
  • Company
  • Region
  • Product name
  • Operational categorization 1, 2 and 3
  • Product categorization 1, 2 and 3
  • Custom fields 
• If you are unable to define cluster boundaries and mixed clusters (across technical stacks, services, or organizations) are acceptable, then you can select only clustering fields. However, this option is not  recommended.
• When selecting number of clusters, we recommend selecting the Let the system find no. of clusters check box. The system automatically selects an optimal number of clusters. However, when you know the number of clusters from prior execution runs or domain knowledge, you can specify a value to improve the response time.
• We recommend using stop words for the selected language so that frequently used words in incidents (for example, company name, region) which should not be used for generating cluster names can be ignored.
• Provide appropriate user permissions to users so that they can create problems and analyze incidents.
• Define your schedule based on the problem management process in your organization. The schedule for clustering jobs can be weekly or bi-weekly or monthly based on your review cycles for problem identification. Typically, the lookback period for each of these schedules is the previous 1-4 weeks of data. 
• The BMC Helix ITSM Insights algorithm groups incidents based on the fields that you select. For best results in creating clusters, select fields that contain a short description of the incident, and avoid the fields that contain long, unnecessary details.

Best practices for real-time incident correlation

We recommend the following best practices for real-time incident correlation:

• Select appropriate Group by fields for incident correlation configuration based on your company structure, organization structure, service ownership (business service), and ownership of technical stack. Adding group-by fields increases scalability of the algorithm to support higher throughputs.
• Select textual fields such as Summary, Description as clustering fields. Avoid using categorical fields such as Company, Service, Operational category, etc.
• To obtain cohesive clusters, we recommend setting the similarity threshold should be in the range of 0.6 to 0.8 .
• Avoid changing the configuration often during a run as it clears the existing clusters. 
• The BMC Helix ITSM Insights algorithm groups incidents based on the fields that you select. For best results in creating clusters, select fields that contain a short description of the incident, and avoid the fields that contain long, unnecessary details.