Orientation

Quick overview

Organizations are rapidly moving their businesses to cloud environments and this adoption provides some challenges along with the advantages. BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker (formerly, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management) enables organizations to ease some challenges that they might face while working in a multi-cloud, multi-provider environment. 

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker is an add-on offering for BMC Helix ITSM that provides the following benefits:

• While using services from multiple cloud providers, organizations can consolidate issues at one place for ease of tracking, and resolve them efficiently.
• Connect multiple agile development tools so that DevOps teams can work at their own pace using their own tools and still integrate into the overall IT change process. 
• Cloud service owners can review the performance and status of the cloud service providers and make necessary decisions for smooth functioning of all cloud services.
• Developers can tailor the functionalities to integrate with service providers or applications that are not provided out-of-the-box.
• Connect on premises or OnDemand BMC Helix ITSM applications to third-party ticketing applications for automated ticket brokering. 

Product features

Collaborated and automated incident brokering

The incident brokering feature enables organizations to manage multiple service desk management issues when working in an IT environment with a multi-cloud, multi-provider setup. 

With this feature, organizations can perform the following actions that resolves the issues:

Learn more about incident brokering with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker in Incident-brokering.

Ticket consolidation

The ticket consolidation feature helps organizations to get better service from their multi-cloud service providers. Using the ticket consolidation feature, you can:

• manage tickets across multiple cloud providers in one integrated service desk
• directly collaborate with multi-cloud providers to efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues
• proactively inform employees of planned service outages via federated calendar

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker lets you consolidate various vendor tickets into BMC Helix ITSM. When a ticket is created in a vendor application, a corresponding BMC Helix ITSM ticket is also created. You can easily synchronize the data and comment updates between the two tickets. The Smart IT console displays the vendor ticket ID as a link that opens the ticket in the vendor ticket management system.

Learn more about ticket consolidation in Consolidation-of-tickets-from-vendor-applications-into-BMC-Helix-ITSM.

DevOps integration

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables DevOps and IT Management teams to work seamlessly, giving developers the flexibility to use their own tools and still integrate into the overall change process and governance that the IT organization mandates. If an organization uses multiple instances of Atlassian JIRA Software,  BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables the organization to integrate these multiple instances of Jira with a single instance of Smart IT to manage tickets for all the instances.

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables organizations to integrate multiple agile development tools like Jira, Rally Software (formerly known as CA Agile Central), Azure DevOps with BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT. 

Learn more about this feature in DevOps-integration.

Cloud service dashboard

The Service Dashboard provided with BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker enables organizations to track response and resolution time for multiple service providers. It includes information about how many incidents were raised for a given time period, what was the response time for the incidents, and how many were resolved within the defined SLA. 

Additionally, the dashboard  provides real-time details about the selected service providers, including the current availability of the service.

Organizations can manage and track data for multiple service providers and use the data to review the quality of their services and analyze the performance. This information can help the organizations make the decisions of the effectiveness of the Service Provider.

Learn more about the service dashboard in Tracking-the-quality-of-cloud-services-by-using-the-BMC-Helix-Multi-Cloud-Broker-Dashboard. 

ITOM integration for cloud monitoring

Pre-built integration with Microsoft Azure and TrueSight Operations Management enables you to monitor your network resources and automatically create incidents in BMC Helix ITSM.  

The following table lists the features that are provided for Azure Monitor and TrueSight Operations Management:

Learn more about the integration with Azure Monitor in Enabling-prebuilt-integration-with-Azure-Monitor.

Learn more about the integration with TrueSight Operations Management in Enabling-prebuilt-integration-with-TrueSight-Operations-Management.

Security

Pre-built integration IBM QRadar Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) enables you to automatically create incidents in BMC Helix ITSM whenever a security offense is generated in IBM QRadar SIEM. 

Currently, the following features are supported:

• Incidents are created in BMC Helix ITSM based on QRadar SIEM offenses.
• Offense status is updated based on updates to BMC Helix ITSM incident status.
• Activity note sharing between QRadar offenses and incidents.
• Offense information is displayed in the Smart IT interface.

Learn more about the integration with QRadar SIEM in Enabling-prebuilt-integration-with-IBM-QRadar.

Tailoring out-of-the-box flows

While using BMC Helix Integration Service, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker provides Incident brokering and Change configuration flows out-of-the-box. By using the user interface driven configuration screens users can tailor complete process flows according to their business requirements. 

Learn more about configuring the out-of-the-box connectors in Deploying-custom-flows-updated-vendor-mappings-and-connector-processes-to-production-environments.

Supported integration platforms

To enable integrations between BMC Helix ITSM and vendor applications, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker supports BMC Helix iPaaS, powered by Jitterbit and BMC Helix Integration Service. These applications enable administrators and developers to configure and tailor the integrations to meet their organization requirements. The applications provide the basic components and functionalities that are required for a successful integration.

Integrations by using BMC Helix iPaaS

BMC Helix iPaaS, powered by Jitterbit is a robust, enterprise grade iPaaS and API Management platform powered by the Jitterbit Harmony API Integration Platform. The platform provides rich, out-of-the-box connectors and integration templates that you can use to address advanced business processes and system integration challenges for digital enterprises. BMC Helix iPaaS helps connect BMC Helix ITSM with hosted, on-premises, cloud, and legacy third-party applications (or vendor applications).

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, along with BMC Helix iPaaS, provides out of the box integration templates that you can use for an integration. An integration template contains project variables that store information such as login credentials, server details, email configuration details, and so on. In the template, certain project variables are predefined whereas some project variables are placeholders that you can update as per your system requirements. 

You can access the out-of-the-box integration templates from the Jitterbit marketplace and import them to your project. After importing the template, you update it with the required details, for example, host URL, server details, email configuration details, and so on, and then run the template.

For more information, seeBMC Helix iPaaS.

You can also customize the out-of-the-box integrations by mapping custom fields between BMC Helix ITSM and a vendor application. To know more, see Mapping-custom-fields-for-integrations-by-using-BMC-Helix-iPaaS.

Integrations by using BMC Helix Integration Service

BMC Helix Integration Service is a cloud-based solution that enables you to design and automate event-driven tasks across applications. You can connect multiple applications in a single flow, and configure the flow to accomplish a task or a set of tasks required for achieving your business goal. You can integrate applications running in the cloud environment. 

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker, along with BMC Helix Integration Service, provides out of the box flows and connectors that you can use to integrate BMC Helix ITSM with a vendor application. The flows contain mappings between BMC Helix ITSM and vendor system fields, and trigger conditions to run an integration. You can update the flow details to suit your requirements. You must also configure the out-of-the-box connectors for the corresponding integrations. If a particular connector does not exist, or an existing connector does not meet your specific business requirements, you can build it from scratch or customize it to fit your needs.

For more information about this platform, see BMC Helix Integration Service.

Features supported by BMC Helix iPaaS and BMC Helix Integration Service

The following table lists the available features and the support BMC Helix iPaaS and BMC Helix Integration Service provides for these features:

Product roles

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker aims to simplify the tasks for the following user roles:

Product documentation

The BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker documentation helps users implement or use this product.