Server group operations


In a server group, the admin server can be the primary owner of one or more specific roles. Each role represents a specific AR System application or component.

In any server group implementation, there is one server that is configured for the administration role. This is typically the first server that is installed and is used to perform all administration operations for the server group. Because all of the servers share the same database, this allows the group to be managed as if it were a single server. 

Other servers can be assigned specific primary roles. For example, a server might be dedicated to just one specific primary task, such as Approval Server, while another server might be setup as a primary server to host a group of roles that might be closely related such BMC Helix CMDB and Atrium Integrator Engine. The primary roles are configured on the AR System Server Group Operation Ranking form, and each server should have at least one other server configured for failover. 

The following image shows the complete list of server group operations for BMC software, as supported by the AR System Server Group Operation Ranking form:

221_server_group_ranking.png

The following table describes the list of server group operations:

Operation

Description

Administration

Performs all administration tasks for the entire server group.

Approval Server

The Approval Server provides the approval functionality within BMC Helix ITSM applications. An approval represents the signature or acknowledgment of an individual where required in a process. The Approval Server records all necessary information to provide an audit trail and proof of authenticity of all approvals.

Archive

The archive feature of AR System provides a convenient way to periodically store data (not definitions) from a form to an archive form; this reduces the amount of data accessed during searches on the main form thus improving system performance. Archiving applies to all types of forms, except display-only forms.

Assignment Engine

Using processes instead of workflow, the Assignment Engine enables you to automatically assign requests to individuals. The assignment method determines who is assigned to an issue when more than one person matches the qualification.

Atrium Integrator

Atrium Integrator is an integration engine that enables you to transfer data from external data stores to BMC Helix CMDB classes. You can connect to a wide variety of input sources using connectors such as JDBC, ODBC, JMS, native databases, web services, and complex XML. Atrium Integrator provides you with the ability to clean and transform your data before putting it into BMC Helix CMDB.

Important: ODBC drivers are not supported in SaaS environments. For on-premises deployments, we do not recommend using ODBC drivers.

Business Rules Engine

The business rules engine is a component of BMC Service Level Management that is used to interpret stored rules to construct the filters that are required to implement the rules. The main form that the business rules engine is the SLA:Business Rules form which contains references to objects required to create a filter.

BMC Helix CMDB

This is a core component of any IT Service Management (ITSM) environment and adds substantial value to a simple Incident Management environment. Specifically, it makes incident management more efficient by providing support staff and IT management an up-to-date image of their production IT environment.

Cognitive Training Service

Cognitive Training Service is an operation using which you can train to classify natural language. For example, you can auto-categorize an incoming ticket to a specific person based on the trends that are derived from the previously assigned tickets. Training can be done by using the previous tickets or by using a .csv file that has a one-to-one mapping (one input field with one output field) or a many-to-one mapping (many input fields with one output field). Cognitive training service integrates with the Innovation Suite, which in turn, integrates with IBM Watson to train and categorize data.

DSO

(For On-premises deployments only) 

The Distributed Server Option (DSO) is used to build large-scale, distributed environments that behave like a single virtual system. DSO enables an organization to share common information among geographically distributed servers and to keep that information consistent. DSO enables you to transfer requests between servers and to keep copies of a request synchronized across multiple servers, even if those servers are geographically dispersed.

Escalation

  • An escalation is an action or group of actions performed on the server at specified times or time intervals. Basically, an escalation is an automated, time-based process that searches for requests that match certain criteria at specified times and takes actions based on the results of the search. For example, an escalation can trigger AR System to notify the next level of management if a problem is not assigned to a technician within one hour of submission.

Flashboards

A real-time visual monitoring tool that can show the state of service operations, warn about potential problems, and collect and display trend data.

Full Text Index

Full text index is the indexing feature for the Full Text Search (FTS) method used in AR System to search for text in long text fields or attached documents. It is typically much faster than using the native database searching functionality.

Reconciliation Engine

The reconciliation engine is a patent-pending component of the BMC Helix CMDB. The reconciliation engine is based on business rules, which allow you to leverage existing data coming from third-party asset or discovery tools. The solution does not lock you into any one vendor's discovery tools or existing asset repositories.

Service Failover

In the AR System environment, companion services provide services such as the Email Engine sending outgoing emails and handling incoming emails. You can deploy these services in a server group, which provides resiliency if something fails. The servers in the group cooperate to manage service failover. The server group manages when the companion services become active to perform tasks and when they are suspended. Also, the companion services are tracked and can fail over independently of any AR System server.

SLM Collector

This process is used to handle SLM Collector failover in a server group environment.

SLM Collector is not supported since version 9.1.04. It is listed in Server Group Ranking for backward compatibility.

 

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