Product overview
With BMC Helix Telco Extensions, BMC extends the Helix IT Service Management excellence into the CSP's (Communications Service Provider) Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC is the essential nerve center for CSPs for delivering, monitoring, maintaining, and repairing all CSP services. The NOC is also expected to deliver always-on services to multiple devices and across fixed and wireless networks. Unfortunately, the CSP has not kept pace with the IT domain for automation and innovation. BMC Helix Telco Extensions is a service management solution offered exclusively to CSPs and is built around eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map) processes.
Challenges for Communication Service Providers
- The telecommunication core connectivity services of data and voice have become a commodity.
- Because of declining CSP revenues and increasing financial pressures we require automated tooling solutions to perform service network operations to deliver service assurance and improve QoE in an increasingly complex environment.
- CSPs are currently maintaining a siloed approach across multiple network domains with fragmented islands of data and diverse mean-time-to-repair (MMTR) and mean-time-to-identify (MTTI) performance metrics. This is challenging from an opex, quick issue resolution, and customer experience standpoint.
- There is little convergence across CSP workflows, data, and remediation processes.
- Due to customer demands, there is increased network usage with decreasing CSP margins.
- There are significant operational costs across personnel and technology that are required to manage the CSP network operations center. Depending upon the maturity level of the CSP, today's CSPs rely on manual efforts to prevent outages and to identify anomalies and root causes and resolve critical service incidents.
- CSP are becoming increasingly software-driven with microservices architecture for flexibility and agility across network and IT domains. However, digital transformation journey has been difficult as CSPs are operating based on legacy technologies with a high number of customized applications as they continue to modernize toward low-code or no-code cloud-based environments with reusable network functions and elements that can be easily integrated and function as shared pools of resources.
Business value for the BMC Helix Telco Extensions product
The flagship capabilities of BMC Helix Telco Extensions include:
Capability | Description |
|---|---|
Alarm Management | CSP networks generate a high volume of alarms daily, submitted by a customer, auto-generated within the network, or from a field technician. Consequently, high alarm volume creates significant incoming activity to the NOC. Today, it requires a manual effort to sort through alarms to determine the critical verses non-critical (or noise) issues and sort through multiple incoming alarms behind a single incident. The proliferation of noise within the NOC delays service response. BMC Helix Telco Extensions, powered by AI/ML, groups all the alarms related to the same incident together. The NOC agent can then have one single panel with all alarms and decide what to do. BMC Helix Telco Extensions embeds alarm prioritization to trigger automated escalations and workflows to remediate the incident. With BMC Helix Telco Extensions, the incoming service alarm noise can be reduced, and incident handling can be streamlined significantly, resulting in a faster MMTR. |
Source Request Management | Compiling metadata logs across the entire CSP network and servicing footprint is often time-consuming and labor-intensive. BMC Helix Telco Extensions automatically generates detailed metadata capturing every resource request, approval, and allocation record. These metadata records are often required for CSP compliance or regulatory purposes. |
Related parties inclusion or multi-party collaboration | CSP NOC agents cannot add users or groups to access and modify a request during the lifecycle of an incident. This is often necessary to support cross-group and domain resolution processes. BMC Helix Telco Extensions allows network engineers to add individual users or groups outside their designated CSP NOC to collaborate on incidents across different NOCs. CSP NOC agents can now add technical specialists, additional SMEs, and other internal teams to access and work on a specific ticket. Improved collaboration results in faster communication and results in a faster MMTR. |
User roles
BMC Helix Telco Extensions delivers automated and intelligent service-centric network operations that:
- Extend Helix IT service management excellence into the Communication Service Providers (CSPs) Network Operations Center (NOC) with BMC Network Operations. BMC Helix Network Operations is a service management solution offered exclusively to CSPs and purpose-built for the unique CSP NOC workflows.
- Advances BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps with leading-edge capabilities designed to help CSPs make zero-touch/zero-trouble network operations a reality.
The following table explains the user goals and features.
Goal | Feature | Task | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
Create and manage incidents | Create and modify incidents automatically from network tools by using alarms | Manage incidents that are created automatically by using alarms. | Incident Manager Support Group Lead |
Modify task locations | Edit the Address field on the task form to add more details about the location. | Incident Manager | |
Give permissions to related parties for viewing incident details | Give team members permission to view incident details. | Incident Manager | |
See status reasons for tasks | Select the required status option for Work in Progress tasks to keep you informed about the progress of a field service technician working on a task:
| Incident Manager | |
Populate task locations automatically based on the selected CI | If you have not provided a location for the task, when you relate one or more CIs to a task, the location of the first CI that matches with the Region, Site group, and Site field values is automatically populated in the Address field. | Incident Manager | |
Set the priority of incidents automatically by mapping the incident priority | When you configure the incident priority mapping for incidents, similar tickets are updated with the priority information all at once, which saves the time that it would take you to manually update each individual incident. So, when an incident is created, if the details match this incident priority mapping criteria, the incident is automatically assigned the Impact, Urgency, and Priority values from the mapping record. | Incident Manager | |
Create source information for an incident | Send incident source information to field service agents quickly and easily by using the Create source information option. | Incident Manager | |
Use CI attributes for incident service targets | After the service targets are created in the Service Level Management Console and if the criteria and qualifications match the CIs that are attached to an incident in BMC Helix Telco Extensions, the service target automatically gets associated to the incident based on the attached CIs. As a service desk agent, you can then prioritize the incidents in BMC Helix Telco Extensions based on these service targets and quickly work and resolve the incidents before the SLA is breached. | Incident Manager Service Desk Agent | |
Relating configuration items to tasks attached to incidents | Use filters to select related CIs | When you relate a configuration item to a task, to allow you to quickly select the required CIs from the list, filter the CIs and display only those CIs that are related to the parent ticket. | Incident Manager |
Alarm management | Split an incident based on alarms | Keep multiple alarm incidents organized by splitting the ticket into two: the original for cleared alarms and the second one for open alarms by selecting the secondary alarms that are open. | Incident Manager |
Mark a secondary alarm as the primary alarm | Select a secondary alarm and mark it as a primary alarm. | Incident Manager | |
Create and manage change requests | Create and modify change requests | Manage change requests that are manually created. | Infrastructure Change Master Infrastructure Change User Infrastructure Change Submitter |
Approving change requests | Approve a change request in the Approval stage and in the Close Down Approval stage. | Infrastructure Change Master Infrastructure Change Approver | |
Analyze the risk and impact of change requests | Access the risk for a change request, compute risk levels, and calculate risk. | Infrastructure Change Master Infrastructure Change User | |
Perform an impact analysis for a change request | Run a network impact analysis for a change request by using the network impact analysis console, view the progress of the impact analysis process for a change request, and relate impacted CIs back to the change request. | Infrastructure Change Master Infrastructure Change User |