Skip to Content

Probable cause analysis in Incident Management by using BMC Helix Service Monitoring

As a service desk agent working on an incident for a shared service, you might want additional insights into the health of a service and probable causes of a service disruption.  When BMC Helix ITSM is integrated with BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps), you can leverage the Probable Cause Analysis (PCA) capability to analyze probable causes and manage the incident faster and effectively. The Top probable causes nodes card (PCA card) displays the most likely causes of service disruption by correlating millions of monitoring data points and analyzing the relationship between infrastructure nodes and services. You can use the PCA card to perform the following actions:

  • Associate related items
  • View related and recent change requests
  • Create and associate change requests
  • Create and associate tasks

Related topic

Integrating-with-BMC-Helix-Service-Monitoring-for-probable-cause-analysisProbable cause analysis (PCA)

The following video (2:27) helps you to learn how to view service health and analyze probable causes by using BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps):
 

icon-play.png https://youtu.be/Az72QV7qDXc

Before you begin

  1. Ensure that the 21.3 or later versions of the following BMC products are available in your system:
    • BMC Helix ITSM: Mid Tier
    • BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT
    • BMC Helix Operations Management
    • BMC Helix Portal
    • BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps)
  2. Administrators must configure the following settings so that the Service Desk agents can see the PCA card on the incident screen :

Task

Reference

Enable Progressive Views for BMC Helix ITSM

Configure the CCS parameters to integrate with BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps)

To view and associate CIs, change requests, and tasks to an incident

Use the Top probable causes nodes card (PCA card) to perform the actions described in the following table:

AIOPs_22_1_PCA_label-Diagram.png

Warning

Important

The PCA card is not displayed for closed and cancelled tickets.

PCA card fields

Action

Result

Reference

1

Hover over the service Impact Service_Impact_Icon.pngicon

Displays the percentage of impact on a service health.

The color of the icon is orange or green according to the service health threshold. This threshold is according to pre-defined weightage that is assigned to service factors in BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps).

Probable cause analysis (PCA)

2

Click View Recent Change Request

Opens the recent change requests that are associated to the CI. The change requests are displayed based on their Actual Start Date.

The number of change requests to be displayed in the Recent Change Request panel is configured by using a CCS parameter.

Click Create Change Request

Opens the Create Change Request screen with the pre-filled information in the Description field. For example, Incident number.

The change request gets associated to the incident and the CI.

Click Create Task

Opens the Create Task screen with the pre-filled information in the Description field. For example, Incident number.

The task gets associated to the incident and the CI.

Click Relate Configuration Item

Relates the CI to the incident. The Association type is set to Impact.

3

Click Refresh ReFresh Icon.pngicon

Refreshes the real time data from BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps).

Important: A form that stores the data from BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps), is refreshed in every 10 minutes. You can customize the time interval by updating the value of the pca.refreshInterval parameter.

Although, the form is refreshed in every 10 minutes, the refreshed data is shown in the incident screen when a user views the incident ticket. For example, the PCA card is refreshed at 10:00 AM for an incident ticket, but a user views the incident at 10:40 AM. At this point, because the last refresh has occurred more than 10 minutes ago, the PCA card data then gets refreshed at 10:40 AM.

To find more details about CCS Parameter, see Setting configuration parameters in BMC Helix ITSM

4

Click View Details

Launches BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps). You view the service health of various business systems.

 

 

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

BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk 25.3