Searching for tickets, assets, resources, and people in BMC Helix ITSM

Search overview

BMC Helix ITSMprovides various search options:

On the incident profile, when you type text to search for the affected asset and service, the system searches for the keyword after you enter the third character and if there is a delay of .5 seconds or more between the time you enter the current and the next character, it starts searching for the string with the current character. For example, you enter Appl and you pause typing, there is a delay of .5 or more seconds. In this case, the system searches for the keyword Appl. Now when you continue to type and enter ication with a delay less than .5 seconds in each character you type, the system searches for the entire keyword Application. Because multiple intermediate search criteria (backend calls) are not sent, the system is not busy, and this improves the performance when you search for affected assets and services.

When you search for customers and contacts in BMC Helix ITSM, the system overrides the values specified in the Customer and Contact Search Type and Customer and Contact Name Format list on the Incident Management Settings window in BMC Helix ITSM. For example, in the Customer and Contact Search Type list, you select Last Name, and in the Customer and Contact Name Format list, you select [First name] [Middle name] [Last name]. In BMC Helix ITSM, notice that you can specify any of the following and search for customers and contacts: corporate ID, first name, last name, internet email ID, phone number, and login ID. In case of the name format, by default BMC Helix ITSM supports only the [first name] [last name] name format.

Global search

BMC Helix ITSMuses the Full Text Search (FTS) to search for tickets and knowledge articles, and database search to search for people and assets. For people and assets search, the following fields are matched for the entered search text.

For global asset search

Tag Number and CI ID are only included in search if an administrator configured the isExclude_TAG_and_CI_ID flag to false.

For global people search:

When you perform the global search, you can select a target area from the list of target areas, and then enter the search criteria. The system searches for the value that you specified, and displays the search result. Ticket and Knowledge is the default target search area. The system displays blank result if you enter the search criteria that does not correspond with the specified target search area. For example, you select Knowledge as the target search area, and specify an incident ID as the search criteria. Because of the mismatch, the system does not display any result.

If you select All as the target search area, the system searches for the search criteria in all target areas, and displays the result.

You can further refine the result by specifying filters. If you change the keyword while using Global search, any filters set previously will be reset.

How Agentic chat and Advanced Responsive Navigation affects global search

If your administrator has enabled any of the following features, a BMC Helix Innovation Studio-based user interface is displayed for global search. This interface replaces the classic Smart IT-based user interface.

• Advanced Responsive Navigation 
• Agentic chat

If Agentic chat is enabled for BMC Helix ITSM, you see the following changes:

• The global search  icon on the navigation bar is replaced with  indicating that Agentic chat is enabled for BMC Helix ITSM.
  When you click , it displays the Chat and Search options to open Agentic chat and global search, respectively.
  Click Search to open the global search.
  
  If you are using Advanced Responsive Navigation bar and clicking  does not show the Chat and Search options, contact your administrator to ensure the enableHelixGPTGlobalChat CCS parameter is enabled.

If Advanced Responsive Navigation is enabled and Agentic chat is disabled, global search is displayed without the Chat and Search options.

The search result displays a summary of each record, so you get an overview of the records without having to open each record.

If you search by using the All or Ticket & Knowledge filter, the search results are categorized and displayed under the respective tabs. You can click a tab to view the records for that category. For example, to view the people records, click the People tab.

You can click the Card  or List  options to view the search results in a card or list format. By default, the search results are displayed in the list view.

​​​​​You can use the Recent searches option to view your recent searches and the Advanced filter option to narrow the search results. The Company advanced filter is unavailable if you click the All or Request filters.

Some ticket types also display pills that provide additional information about the ticket such as the priority of the ticket.

The following table provides information about the pills that are displayed for the ticket types: 

Limitations of BMC Helix Innovation Studio-based global search

• A maximum of 50 records are displayed per search.
  To view all the search results, use the search option in the respective consoles. For example, use the Search option in the Ticket Console to search for tickets.
• When you type in the search box, global search does not show search suggestions.
• The global search page does not fully support localization. Therefore, if you select a different locale, some search results might still be displayed in English.
• When previewing an incident from the search result, you can click the Ask HelixGPT tab in the preview pane and click a source knowledge article to preview it. However, you cannot open the full knowledge article from the preview pane. 
• The Create date advanced filter is not applicable if you use the Request filter to search for DWP tickets.
• Global search is not supported on web browsers for mobile devices.
• If your administrator has set the useARUserPreferenceForTimezone CCS parameter to true and configured a user preference time zone, the date and time in the search records are displayed according to the date and time configuration of your computer. 
  For example, if Eastern Standard Time is configured as the user preference time zone, the updated date and time of an incident in the search result is displayed according to the date and time configuration of your computer. ​​​​​​
  To view the date and time according to the user preference time zone configuration, open the record in the preview pane.
• If you click a BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround knowledge article in the search result, the preview pane does not show its preview. To view the knowledge article, click the knowledge article from the Card view, and click Go to Knowledge in the preview pane.

BMC Helix ITSM console search

The BMC Helix ITSM search function scans your environment for records that contain a match for the word or phrase that you type in the console Search field at the top of the screen. You can also augment your search by including special characters and boolean expressions. The search results include only information that you have permission to access. While creating a new knowledge article, retired articles will not be listed under Recommended Knowledge or suggested knowledge articles. You can search for Retired articles only through the global search or advanced search using the Search for knowledge resources option.

In Shared Ticket Console, when you use search, the wild character ‘%’ is automatically appended to the search criteria. For example, if your search criteria contain the value Allen, ‘%’ is automatically appended to the search criteria; as a result, the search criteria will be %Allen%.

The Search function searches for matches to your query across the following record types:

• Incident tickets
• Work orders
• Change requests
• Problem investigations
• Known errors
• Release tickets
• Tasks
• Service requests
• Knowledge articles
• People profiles
• Asset profiles
• Outages

To use special characters and boolean expressions in search

You can include special characters and boolean expressions in your search, as explained in the following tables.

Special characters and their results

Boolean operators and their results

To use boolean operators, you must enter them in upper case; otherwise, they are treated as search strings. AND, OR, and NOT operators are applicable only when searching for tickets and knowledge articles.

To filter search results

The Search function displays the search results in a list that is grouped by record type: tickets, knowledge resources, and so on. You can also apply filters to the list to help narrow the results and more quickly identify what you are looking for. 

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

1. To accomplish an assigned task, Ian Plyment, a help desk specialist, needs to look at all of the incident records that were created for Allen Allbrook in the past week, and that are still open.
2. In the Search field, located at the top right of the universal client, or main menu on mobile clients, Ian types Allen, then presses the Enter key or taps Search.
3. The Search returns 520 records that match "Allen" (511 tickets, 1 asset record, 1 people record, and 7 knowledge resources). Because there is a large number of tickets and knowledge resources found by the search, the search results list displays only 4 of the tickets and only 4 of the knowledge resources. Ian can, however, view all of the tickets or knowledge resources by selecting View All.  The number of records displayed on-screen when the search returns a large number of results is controlled by the application.
4. To narrow the list of tickets, Ian needs to filter the list.
   1. He clicks or taps the Filter icon at the top of the list, then clicks or taps Record Type and selects Incident. If Ian were working from a tablet, he would then tap Back to go back to the Filter list.
   2. Ian clicks Filter again to further narrow the results list by showing Created Date and then selecting Past Week from the menu. Additionally, since Ian was looking for only security incidents, he selects Security Incident from the Incident Type drop-down menu.
   3. Finally, because he only wants to see incident tickets belonging to Calbro Services, he applies the Company filter. To apply the Company filter, he clicks Filters, selects Company, and uses the search field to locate the correct company. If necessary, Ian can apply more than one filter of a specific type. For example, if Ian wanted to see all of Allen's Incident and Work Order tickets that were created in the last week, Ian could add a second Record Type filter to include Work Order tickets. Alternatively, if Ian needs to remove one of the filters, he can click the X in the filter tag. To remove all of the filters, Ian would click or tap Clear All. 
      As Ian adds a filter to the search results lists, the system also adds tags beside the filter Icon, so that Ian can see which filters he has applied. This combination of filters (Create Date, Record Type, Incident Type, and Company) reduces the search results list from 511 tickets to 10.
5. With this much more manageable list of tickets, Ian is able to quickly review the remaining records to accomplish his assigned task.

To search for specific tickets on the Console (all three consoles), select multiple filters and click Apply. The system displays the result according to the filters that you specified. When selecting filters if you select Cancel , the system cancels your selection and displays the result according to the filters that were previously applied. Note that you must select minimum two filters for the system to display the result. If you have set preset, and additionally specified filters, the system displays the result as per the preset and filters. To clear all the filters, click the Clear Filters option. The system now displays the result according to the default preset.

All Open and All Closed filters

The following statuses are considered when you select the All Open filter:

Draft, Assigned, In Progress, Pending, Waiting Approval, Planning, Work in Progress, New, Staged, Request for Change, Request for Authorization, Planning in Progress, Scheduled for Review, Scheduled for Approval, Scheduled, Implementation in Progress, Change in Draft, Problem in Draft, Problem under Review, Problem under Investigation, Assigned to Vendor, Scheduled For Correction, Build Approval, Close Down Approval, Deployment Approval, Initiation Approval, Planning Approval, Registered, Test Approval.

The following statuses are considered when you select the All Closed filter:

Close, Completed, Closed, Rejected, Cancelled, Resolved, No Action Planned

Instructions for classic interfaces