This documentation supports the 20.02 version of Remedy Change Management.To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu.

Integration overview

Each instance of BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management provides a single access point which must be registered, configured, and activated for Change Management. When event notification is enabled, Change Management sends all subscribed change events to the configured BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management instance. 

BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management can use these notifications to define their blackout policies, so that no alerts are sent out for planned change events that cause down time.

Related topic

Defining-CAI-plug-in-options-for-BMC-ProactiveNet-Performance-Management-integration


Important

Integration is activated when BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management subscribes to Change Management events in one of the following ways:

  • If Change Management is already installed, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management integrates and subscribes to Change Management events automatically during installation. The subscription is activated when you run BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management.

  • If Change Management is not installed during the installation of BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, install Change Management, and execute the following command on the BMC ProactiveNet Server to activate the subscription:

    pw itsm_cm activate -reason <Integration_Status_Change_Reason>
    [-email_addrs <semi-colon(;) separated email address>]

For detailed information enabling and disabling subscription to Change Management events, see the section on Integrating Change Management with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management in the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Administration Guide and the BMC ProactiveNet Command Line Interface Reference Guide.

How the integration works

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

Jim is a network operations center (NOC) operator at a company that has multiple monitoring tools for its IT environment. The monitoring tools generate events for all changes that occur in the environment. Due to lack of communication between users who introduce these changes and the NOC operators, the NOC operators end up troubleshooting events generated by known change requests, wasting time and resources.

The integration of Change Management with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management allows Jim to reduce the number of events generated by changes introduced in the environment. The integration allows him to automatically block and notify users of any change including:

  • Blackouts (unplanned or emergency changes)
  • Scheduled maintenance (planned changes)
  • Any change to devices, service, or application (start and end of changes) including a configuration change
  • Any change to applications (start and end of changes) including configuration. For example, the user should be notified that a patch would be applied on device 23.

For example, Roger, the distributed server operations user, requests Rahul, the Change Coordinator, to schedule a security patch update for selected servers.

Jim has configured an automated CI blackout policy for change requests received through Remedy ITSM. This policy:

  • Marks all events occurring the in scheduled time period for that CI to blackout
  • Automatically schedules downtime of PNet Schedule downtime in BPPM for change requests received through ITSM.
  • Stops data collection
  • Stops Alarms and abnormalities generation
  • Sets CI to maintenance mode

Becky, the Event and Impact Management – Service Model administrator, requests that the status of CIs changed to Scheduled Downtime in the Service Model.

For this use case, the following procedure is followed:

  1. Roger contacts Rahul about scheduling maintenance of the selected group of servers to apply the latest security patches.
  2. Rahul schedules the server for the maintenance 2 weeks from the date of the request for 5 hours.
  3. Jim receives an event in the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management GUI notifying him of the upcoming maintenance.He also receives a notification that the Cell Blackout Policy and PNET downtime schedule was created.
  4. When the date of maintenance arrives, the event status is modified in the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management GUI to notify him of that fact that now the designated servers are in down for scheduled maintenance. He also sees that all events received from the CIs that represent the servers that are now in maintenance, are set to blackout state.
  5. Becky sees that the CIs status representing servers is changed to Blackout in the Service Model.
  6. When at the end of the scheduled down period, the Change request is marked as completed, Jim observes that the event status is modified to Completed and validates that the Blackout Policy and PNET Schedule downtime are removed. Events received for the CIs reflect the actual state of the CIs. Jim also receives Event Status Closed for the event that was originally generated from the change request.
  7. Becky observes that CIs status is back to normal state in the Service Model.

 

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