We are delighted to announce our latest 23.2 Spring release for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, packed full of new innovations that enable customers to gain even more value from their investment and stay ahead of potential IT issues. We’ve enhanced service modeling, which improves service assurance for customers, added more vendors for out-of-the-box integrations and a larger data lake for customers to abstract data from, and much more. Read on to learn more about these exciting new enhancements.

BMC Helix Operations Management

We’ve rolled out new artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-powered Situations capability to help customers manage major incidents, which includes:

New Service Blueprints: Service models are critical for real-time identification of service impacts; however good service models can be hard to create and maintain. With new Service Blueprints, you can define simple templates like a microservice on Kubernetes and then apply that template to all your other microservices, using AI/ML to monitor applications and continually analyze them for signs of trouble, identify patterns and trends, and take appropriate action.

Primary Situations: When you have thousands of events pouring in from many different sources and stakeholders across the organization demanding answers, you need a solution that gets you to the source of an issue fast. With the new Situations functionality, we can reduce event noise through automatic AI correlation. Multiple Situations are grouped into Primary Situations, so a common root cause be identified and fixed by the right team, leading to less distraction and faster mean time to repair (MTTR).

Situation Explainability: To quickly verify logic and get peace of mind about why a decision has been made, Situation Explainability can provide visual representations that help you validate how events were correlated and how the root cause was identified.

Situation Fingerprinting: The new Situation Fingerprinting feature leverages AI to automatically identify whether a similar situation has previously occurred. If you have seen and resolved the problem once, there is no need to go through the entire process again. Recurring situations are fingerprinted for easier future identification to help speed MTTR, reduce noise and staff toil, and improve service performance.

Figure 1. BMC Helix Operations Management – Situation Explainabilty.

BMC Helix Log Analytics:

In the 23.2 Spring release for BMC Helix Log Analytics, we built an additional capability that use ML and unsupervised deep-learning model to assess data, detect anomalies from logs, and generate events that quickly alert you to impending problems in your application or system.

Figure 2. BMC Helix Log Analytics – Discover.

Figure 3. BMC Helix Log Analytics – Self Monitoring.

BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations

BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations use REST APIs and Webhook mechanisms to communicate with a data source, providing an easy-to-use, click-and-connect capability to configure an integration and bring in resource information, topology, and services from third-party data sources for an end-to-end view of your environment. In this release, users will find new connector support for Kafka, SAP HANA, and CA UIM and a connector enhancement for CA APM (topology).

The new and enhanced connectors make it faster and easier for customers to add their third-party monitoring data to BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, delivering more data sources to strengthen the AIOps algorithms’ ability to isolate root cause and speed MTTR.

Figure 4. BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization uses intelligence and predictive analytics to manage IT resources and applications, including those based on Kubernetes and pods, microservices, containers, and multi-cloud services.

The latest release continues to build on its strong foundation by enhancing capabilities in the migration assessment tool to allow for quicker migrations and adding new out-of-the-box AIX views that allow customers to analyze the capacity of the AIX infrastructure and integrate the views into BMC Helix Dashboards.

New out-of-the-box service risk dashboards allow users to visualize a business service’s performance and gain insights into its overall health and status based on the correlation between business drivers and resources of a pool.

Figure 5. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization – AIX views.

New Synthetic Monitoring

BMC is also introducing a new partnership with Catchpoint, a web-based-software-as-a-service (SaaS) monitoring solution that enables end-to-end transaction monitoring.

Combining Catchpoint’s synthetic data solution with the BMC Helix platform, BMC delivers a complete solution where synthetic information can be used in tandem with infrastructure, application performance monitoring (APM), AIOps, or network data.

To learn more about this latest release and for an overview of the new features in  BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, please refer to the release notes below:

• BMC Helix Operation Management
• BMC Helix AIOps
• BMC Helix Log Analytics
• BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
• Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring

Our development is highly dependent on the feedback we receive from our customers, partners, and the wider analyst communities. Thank you to all of you who contributed feedback to us. To continue the discussion, tell us how you’re using the new features and workflows and share suggestions to improve the product experience on the BMC Helix Operations Management community forum.

Synthetic monitoring has many different names: End to end, response time, robotic, end user perspective, digital experience monitoring and more. Despite the many different names, we are aligning and defining the term synthetic monitoring as the ability to capture the success and timings of a scheduled test that simulates a user interacting with a remote service. Synthetic monitoring can automatically monitor and test application availability and performance across production and development environments so you can fix issues and optimize digital experience before users are affected.

The idea is to answer the most important question, “Is my service available and does it perform to the expectations of my end users?” It’s a simple question, but only synthetic monitoring can answer it for certain. All the other observability components answer different questions and tell you whether your service is available, but they won’t be 100 percent correct all the time.

When do you need synthetic monitoring?

If you deliver services that have a multi-tier architecture and a web front end to internal or external users, then you must have synthetic monitoring as your first monitor. It will alert you when users cannot not interact with your service and proactively reduces the risk of a service impact.

Depending on how detailed your test is, synthetic monitoring can provide leading indicators about the root cause of an issue. Synthetic tests can differ from a simple URL check to alert when the web user interface (UI) is not responding, up to multi-step transactional tests to validate that you can log in, access an e-commerce shop, add dummy items to the shopping cart, and finish the checkout. If your payment system has a problem, then the synthetic test only fails once you go to the checkout process to pay. However, synthetic monitoring does not tell you why the payment system failed or alert you proactively if resources are at maximum capacity. This is where BMC Helix for Observability and Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) can help, providing you with predictive alerting and root cause analysis.

What challenges can synthetic monitoring solve?

Many companies are on a digital transformation journey, deploying new internal web-based services and implementing software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that reside on several cloud platforms. To avoid unpredictable and costly outages, you need a solution that is easy to use, fast to deploy, and can scale for your business.

When it comes to end users interacting with your web services, a poor or frustrating experience can cost you through loss of sales, loss of reputation, and brand issues. To stay ahead of these issues, synthetic monitoring allows you to monitor from where it matters and to gain full visibility into the metrics that are mission-critical for your business.

How does it work ?

Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring is a SaaS solution with over 2,000 vantage locations around the world that makes it easy to run synthetic tests from your customer locations at scale. It has the ability to deploy agents (enterprise nodes) to the customer-owned hardware on-premises or in a private cloud for internal testing. No other vendor has more out-of-the-box test types to support modern technologies, leveraging JavaScript and Selenium to make your API or muti-transactional test as simple as a URL check.

Figure 1. Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring dashboard.

What are the combined benefits of the BMC Helix platform and Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring?

BMC Helix for Observability and AIOps is a SaaS solution purpose-built for performance and scalability. The BMC Helix platform leverages hundreds of micro-services, has a shared data lake, operates as an open platform, can ingest data from multiple sources, and has a Catchpoint connector. By ingesting Catchpoint’s synthetic data into the BMC Helix platform, we are now able to give customers a complete solution where synthetic information can be used in tandem with infrastructure, application performance monitoring (APM), AIOps, or network data.

BMC Helix will alert you that the database has slow transactions, seeing the increased response time of the related web UI and pointing you to the root cause of a congested storage system using its own AIOps. Synthetic monitoring can also enrich your service models using response time as a health indicator for your business service dashboards. Catchpoint can also provide value in combination with the BMC Helix platform, using AI and machine learning (ML) to not only point to the root cause but also predict service failures by:

• Resolving incidents before they impact your business
• Gaining deep and broad visibility into the internet stack
• Providing alerts on key uptime, performance, or reachability criteria
• Offering AI-powered smartboards with drilldown capabilities

Figure 2. Detailed Catchpoint Monitoring transaction view.

Want to learn more? Please click here to learn more about the benefits of synthetic monitoring.

BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, a key part of our ServiceOps offering powered by the BMC Helix platform, uses predictive capabilities to proactively improve the performance and availability of IT services across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to manage the complexity and scale of IT operations (ITOps) while delivering fast time-to-value, ease of use, integration via open APIs, and reduced operational costs.

The BMC Helix Winter Release 2023 is now available and offers customers several significant enhancements:

• Service Topology and Service Modeling
• BMC Helix Operations Management
• BMC Helix Log Analytics
• New BMC Intelligent Integrations
• Expanded Monitoring Support
• BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
• VMWare Deep Discovery

BMC Helix Operations Management Winter Release 2023 features include:

Service Topology and Service Modeling

Network-to-infrastructure-to-application correlation

Based on data collected using BMC and third-party tools via BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations, BMC provides an end-to-end service topology view using automated topology reconciliation with BMC Helix Discovery and our Dynamic Service Modeling (DSM) capabilities.

Service topology binds network devices and interfaces to infrastructure components and servers through to application endpoints, including URLs, and provides users with an end-to-end view to quickly identify an impacted node for faster root cause analysis.

Figure 1. Service Topology and DSM.

Building on our DSM and Topology enhancements, we have improved our Service Blueprint capability to auto-detect relationships across different components. Service Blueprints can be used to model one or more services at a click of a button, making the entire experience very user friendly.

Figure 2. Service Blueprints.

Service Health score enhancements based on impact propagation

The health of a parent service is dependent on the health of its child services meaning if an event is raised on a CI that impacts the child service, the impact will propagate to the parent service. Even if the parent service is not impacted directly and has no events, the health score of parent service shows the propagated impact from its child service. If more than one child service is impacted, the lowest health score is displayed.

This release further improves root cause analysis to provide more flexibility propagating the impact from a child to a parent service.

Figure 3. Impact propagation.

BMC Helix Operations Management

Improved anomaly detection

Anomalies are observations that diverge from a well-structured data pattern, an irregular spike in the time-series data, or unclassifiable data points within a specific data set. An anomaly could occur independently or due to a combination of factors. For example, the combination of slow response time and high memory utilization together may impact the expected system behavior.

The BMC Helix Operations Management Winter Release 2023 has improved anomaly detection by helping customers detect abnormal behavior more accurately and by reducing the occurrence of false positives and false negatives within an environment.

Log Analytics

Log Collection Framework to ingest logs

To provide a smooth onboarding experience and ingest logs easily, this release contains a new user-interface-based log collection framework that uses connectors and collection policies. Connectors are software agents deployed on remote hosts or VMs to collect logs from different software applications.

Log Collection Framework provides centralized administration to manage connectors as well as monitor their health. Collection policies define which set of logs to collect, select the connectors, apply any data source specific configurations, and provide rules to parse and filter logs data.

Figure 4. Log analysis centralized administration.

New BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations connectors

BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations use REST APIs and Webhook mechanisms to communicate with a data source; provide an easy-to-use click-and-connect capability to configure an integration; and bring in resource information, topology, and services from third-party data sources for an end-to-end view of your environment. New additions include:

• Events and metrics for Nagios
• Events and metrics for CA/Broadcom
• Events and metrics for Catchpoint

Expanded Monitoring Support

Elasticsearch:
Users can now take advantage of the Elasticsearch service provided by the BMC Helix platform for full-text search in the BMC Helix Innovation Suite. Elasticsearch is deployed with BMC Helix platform services and can be used to store ingested events and logs.

SAP^® HANA Monitoring:
SAP^® HANA monitoring is significantly enhanced with additional parameters for the HANA instance and HANA DB. Additionally, it also provides native support S4HANA.

Security Enhancement:
Third-party vault support: With this release, the Monitoring solution can talk to a user-owned, third-party vault system to communicate for authentication. Currently, Oracle Monitoring and CyberArk vault are supported.

Platform Support:
The BMC Helix Winter Release 2023 adds the following support for BMC Helix Operations Management: Alma 9.x, Debian 11.x, and Windows 2019 support for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Event Management:

Several key features have been introduced for Event Management in BMC Helix Operations Management:

• Multi-class support for event policies selection criteria
  • Users can select more than one event class within a single event management policy selection criterion, which will significantly reduce the manual effort required.

• API Key Rotation
  • BMC always treats security as a priority across all of our products, and this release introduces API key rotation, where the API key generated by the BMC Helix platform can be rotated within the key rotation period defined by the user. This key will be automatically sent by BMC Helix Operations Management to all the patrol agents for the authentication process to improve security.

• Published REST API to execute agent commands (via Patrol Script Language (PSL))
  • BMC Helix Operations Management has introduced this API that can be used with automation solutions/scripting to execute PSL-based commands on a group of patrol agents for agent-related diagnostics or task automation.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization uses intelligence and predictive analytics to manage IT resources and applications, including those based on Kubernetes and pods, microservices, containers, and multi-cloud services.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization Winter Release 2023 continues to build on its strong foundation by expanding capabilities to:

• Improve memory recommendations for Kubernetes containers
  • Review and analyze the improved memory recommendations to resolve a probable risk or efficiency issue with the capacity of your Kubernetes containers

• Reconcile entities to resolve duplicate data
  • After reconciliation, the duplicate entities are merged and displayed as a single entity

• Filter entities by entity status in a summary data mart
  • Users can exclude entities that are no longer useful, such as dismissed entities, or include only active entities in the data mart

• Extract status details of Gateway Server and agents
  • Data is extracted daily by using the Gateway Server Administration Helper system task. Status data for the last 30 days is available

• Review data from the virtual node namespace in the VMware vSphere view

• Update all remote ETL engines simultaneously

• Enhance Moviri – k8s (Kubernetes) Prometheus Extractor to import the CONTAINER_NUM metric for the pod workload

• Support new versions of operating systems
  • For a full list of supported operating systems, please view this page.

•  Additional AI-driven insights
  • Kubernetes based on Java Management Extensions(JMX) metrics
    AI/ML driven insights aligns Kubernetes and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) configurations allowing for effective Kubernetes service risk mitigation and reducing MTTR for JVM based services.

VMWare Deep Discovery

Discovering guest hosts via vCenter API

BMC Helix Discovery enables you to discover the guest hosts that are managed by vCenter, even if those hosts are not accessible from the appliance or the BMC Helix Discovery outpost being used.

When a vCenter server or appliance is found and a valid vCenter credential is available, BMC Helix Discovery retrieves a list of managed ESX and ESXi hosts. This requires a valid vCenter credential if the vCenter server or appliance was discovered with an SNMP or Windows credential. The IP addresses of these hosts are added, as part of the same scan range, to the list of IP addresses that are going to be scanned. BMC Helix Discovery uses the vSphere API to discover ESX and ESXi hosts.

Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) discovery of ESX and ESXi hosts is a fallback method used when other methods have been unsuccessful. If SSH access has not been enabled, the ESX or ESXi system is not discovered.

Learn more about BMC Helix Operations Management

For an overview of the new features in BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps Winter Release 2023, please refer to the release notes below:

• BMC Helix AIOps Release Notes
• BMC Helix Operation Management Release Notes
• BMC Helix Discovery: Discovering VMware guest hosts by using the vCenter API
• BMC Helix Log Analytics:
  • BMC Helix Log Analytics Release Notes
  • BMC Helix Log Analytics Winter Release 2023 What’s New Video
  • BMC Helix Continuous Optimization Release Notes
  • BMC Helix AIOps Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

For an overview of the new features in the BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps October 2022 Release, please refer to this blog post.

You can also join us on the BMC Helix Operations Management community forum to discuss any of the new features and workflows or share suggestions to improve the product experience.

A big thanks to all the BMC Helix Operations Management users who contributed by submitting PRs, bug reports, and feedback!

BMC Helix Operations Management with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), a key part of the BMC Helix ServiceOps platform, uses predictive capabilities to proactively improve the performance and availability of IT services across multicloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to manage the complexity and scale of IT operations (ITOps) while delivering fast time-to-value, ease of use, integration via open APIs, and reduced operational costs.

The October 2022 release is available now and offers several significant enhancements to:

• AIOps
• Public cloud monitoring
• Kubernetes monitoring
• Security
• Platform support

What’s New in AIOps

Situation Explainability

Situations uses an AI/ML-based event processing technique to identify event patterns from hundreds of raw events, reduce noise, and automatically group similar events together and associate them with a service. To understand and explain Situations, a new feature called “situation summary” provides easily readable insight based on natural language processing (NLP) to describe the problem and its root cause. This helps the service operator or site reliability engineer (SRE) understand the situation context easily, and whether it needs immediate action based on the underlying cause and severity of the problem.

Figure 1. NLP based natural language Situation summary

Service Insights

Service insights uses an AI/ML-based, auto-detection engine that monitors applications automatically and continuously analyzes data for signs of trouble to help ITOps teams make sense of the overwhelming data and more precisely identify trends that are often difficult to pinpoint.

This release also extends service insights based on events data to provide visibility into service performance and availability. It helps discover the behavior of events, their severity, the number of critical and major events, whether they increased or decreased, and their impact to the given service. You can use these insights to take actions proactively to improve service health.

Figure 2. Service insights based on events

Service Predictions

Service Predictions provides predictive analytics to predict and prevent service outages. It analyzes service health indicators or key performance metrics and their interdependencies to forecast the service impact. As an operator, you can monitor the list of prediction events that might impact a service, along with their predicted severity and first impact occurrence, so proactive actions can be taken to solve the problem before it reaches users.

Figure 3. Service Predictions dashboard

Business Service Risk Dashboard:

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can see risks and resource congestion for business services. This helps to proactively detect saturations and gives the opportunity to make changes before any service impact occurs. The latest release will bring all business services into the single Service Risk Dashboard that shows potential risks to the performance and availability of services using health KPIs based on business drivers and performance metrics.

Figure 4. Service Risk Dashboard

Forecasting as a Service Tool (FaaST)

FaaST is a great new way for customers to see, try, and learn about the powerful metric-forecasting capabilities in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. Metric forecasting is a critical capability for any organization that wants to move from reactive to proactive (e.g., Are my orders going to exceed my capacity this month? At this rate of storage consumption, when will I run out?). BMC Helix Continuous Optimization leverages multiple algorithms to identify the most accurate view of the future, giving users more time to plan and respond.

Figure 5. FaaST results page

Public Cloud Monitoring

In additional to the existing Google Cloud monitoring capability, we’ve expanded our public cloud monitoring coverage for leading cloud platforms Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Public cloud services and additional metrics have been included in the existing cloud monitoring services.

The following are the additional services included for public cloud monitoring:

Figure 6. Public cloud monitoring

Kubernetes Monitoring

We’ve introduced the monitoring solution deployment as Kubernetes DaemonSet, which improves monitoring scalability and includes additional metrics for persistent volume, replicaset, statefulset, deployment, and replication controller.

Security

BMC Helix Monitor Agent (Patrol) gets additional security enhancement with AES-GCM cypher support and Proxy support for Solaris, AIX, and HP UX.

Additional Platform Support

With this release, BMC Helix monitoring now supports RHEL9.x and Ubuntu 22.4.

Highlights from BMC Helix Operations Management October 2022

Several key features have been introduced for event management in this release of BMC Helix Operations Management:

• Modify event slot from BMC Helix Operations Management user interface (UI)
  • Users can change the event slot values from UI on on-demand basis.
• Delete Event—UI and API support
  • Users can delete events from the BMC Helix Operations Management UI or with the API support
• Timeframe support for event policies
  • Timeframe support can be configured for all the event policies

Figure 7. Modify event

Log Archive and Restore

While we ingest and retain data for up to 30 days, this data is stored in hot storage by default and is purged after 30 days. You may need to retain data for longer duration to meet audit and compliance requirements, optimize storage, reduce costs, and identify patterns and trends, or to conduct on-demand troubleshooting and diagnostics.

With the new log archival feature available in the latest release of both the SaaS and on-premises solution, an IT administrator can archive the data to a low-cost cold storage solution for long-term retention.

Highlight from the log archive and restore are:

• Fields extraction
  • Enables users to parse and extract fields (key-value pairs) from log records
• BMC Helix Dashboards for Log Analytics
  • Monitor and visualize log data from AWS, Kubernetes log monitoring, and log events monitoring

If you need to search any data in cold storage, you can restore it back for querying and analysis.

Figure 8. Logs archival and restore

New Connectors with Intelligent Integration

New connectors are provided to collect events, metrics, and topology data from third-party products such as Azure Monitor, VMWare Aria Operations, and Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (NNMi). In addition, you can deploy the BMC Helix intelligent integrations gateway in your on-premises environment to collect and send data to BMC Helix applications.

With this release we’ve introduced new connectors with intelligent integration for VMware vRealize Operations and Microsoft Azure, and made further integration enhancements to our AWS Connector and NNMi.

Learn more about BMC Helix IT Operations Management

For a quick overview of the new features in the October 2022 release of BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, refer to the release notes. To learn more about the new features in BMC Helix Log Analytics, watch the What’s new in Helix Log Analytics October 2022 video and review the release notes.

For a complete list of new features, changes, and bug fixes, check out the BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps product documentation and BMC Helix Log Analytics product documentation and product overview video.

We encourage you to try both now from the BMC Helix cloud. Sign up for free here!

You can also join us on the BMC Helix Operations Management community forum to discuss any of the new features and workflows, or share suggestions to improve the product experience.

A big thanks to all the BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps users who contributed by submitting PRs, bug reports, and feedback!