In the ever-evolving landscape of IT technology, amid the swift migration to cloud and containerized environments, organizations are striving to harness the benefits of scalability and flexibility while confronting the complexities of resource management and optimization, risks to service assurance, and cost containment. The solution lies in finding the delicate balance between ensuring impeccable service delivery and maximizing resource efficiency.

Cloud migration has ushered in a new era of possibilities, enabling organizations to transcend the limitations of traditional infrastructure. Despite these boundless opportunities, IT teams find themselves caught between the business imperatives of maintaining optimal service levels and making smart financial choices. This dynamic requires the orchestration of resources spanning diverse landscapes from hybrid configurations to fully cloud-based ecosystems and a holistic strategy that marries operational excellence with financial sensibility. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization does just that, orchestrating resources, services, and costs to ensure flawless, efficient, and cost-effective performance.

Navigating complexity

The shift to the cloud promises numerous benefits, from improved service levels to scalability, right-sizing, and cost savings. However, the journey isn’t without its share of challenges. Cloud adoption often introduces complexities tied to resource allocation, management across hybrid environments, and the ability to align resource provisioning with actual service demands, which leaves IT professionals ask questions such as:

• How can we ensure optimal service performance and availability in the cloud without incurring excessive costs through overprovisioning?
• How can we efficiently allocate resources across diverse deployment models, now and in the future?
• What strategies can we employ to predict future resource needs and ensure our cloud services are equipped to handle evolving business demands?

To address these challenges, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization goes beyond standard resource management, providing an integrated dashboard and a real-time, single pane of glass for all your business services. The solution’s whole-world view not only helps you optimize current resource allocation but also uses “what-if” simulation capabilities to proactively anticipate future resource needs. Leveraging data-driven insights derived from historical trends, consumption patterns, and projected growth, it ensures that your cloud resources are precisely aligned with upcoming requirements.

Addressing risk with service assurance and optimization

Instead of relying on traditional resource allocation methods, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization ensures that the allocation of resources is tailored to match the real-time demands of various services, delivering optimal performance levels and eliminating unnecessary wastage, which is crucial for efficient resource management in cloud environments.

Controlling costs with cloud-powered insights

Amid the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of cloud resource consumption, it’s essential to bridge the gap between resource allocation and service excellence to better control costs. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization comprehensively monitors and intricately analyzes trends in cloud resource consumption, drawing correlations with essential business KPIs to generate insights that are actionable.

The solution leverages that wealth of data alongside historical analysis and predictive modeling to understand how resource consumption patterns align with critical business key performance indicators (KPIs). From there, it’s able to make informed recommendations for allocation and rightsizing that mitigate the risk of overprovisioning while addressing wastage and surplus expenditures—and controlling costs.

Forecasting with confidence

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization’s forecasting capabilities empower organizations to proactively anticipate future resource requirements and allocate cloud resources well ahead of actual demand. The result is a seamless cloud operational landscape that remains resilient even in the face of change, ensuring uninterrupted services and consistent performance.

Orchestrating cloud excellence

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization offers a comprehensive approach that continuously monitors your business services’ resource utilization by analyzing trends, modeling demand, and correlating business KPIs to help manage complexity by right-sizing resources, managing risk, and meeting service levels without overspending.

Learn how BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can help you manage your cloud resources efficiently and deliver essential visibility and forecasting capabilities to stay ahead in the dynamic cloud landscape at bmc.com/optimize.

Try our self-guided demo, where you’ll discover the tools that enable better resource planning for today and tomorrow. Compare costs and resource requirements with our free Cloud Simulator tool.

Experience some of the forecasting capabilities of BMC Helix Continuous Optimization with the free Forecasting as a Service Tool (FaaST!).

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization is used by our customers to achieve their service assurance and optimization goals. Powerful visualization, prediction, optimization, and automation capabilities enable organizations to realize significant cost–savings and guarantee stability across on-premises and multi-cloud IT estates. 

BMC also leverages these powerful features to optimize our own BMC Helix software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and on-premises software.

One of the mantras we repeat to our customers is, “Your optimization efforts are not a one-time thing. They’re continuous.” BMC’s SaaS operations teams continuously monitor and optimize the BMC Helix SaaS platform using BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to ensure we’re efficiently delivering stable, cost-efficient services to our customers who use our modern, scalable, containerized BMC Helix platform.  

As demand changes, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization automatically recommends and automates optimal configurations for memory, CPU, and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) settings, and horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA). Employing the solution internally also helps BMC ensure that we’re allocating the right resources, without over–provisioning, to guarantee a stable and highly performant service for our customers. The BMC Helix SaaS platform continually delivers 99.99 percent average availability across all regions spanning 30+ subscription services, exceeding our service level agreement (SLA) commitment. 

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization has also enabled us to significantly optimize the BMC software solutions that our customers deploy in their on-premises, public or private cloud context. As part of a recent project to improve the resource requirements of BMC Helix ITSM, we identified optimizations that will allow our customers to reduce their Kubernetes compute footprint by more than 20 percent—without making any changes to BMC code.  

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization provided visibility and actionable insights into the behavior of how BMC Helix Service Management application behaves under load at every level of the Kubernetes architecture. The intuitive user-interface allowed our engineers to explore optimization opportunities for CPU, memory, and storage across clusters, namespaces, nodes, and pods. 

Figure 1. A sample of dashboards showing Kubernetes container usage and suggestions for improved efficiency.

Actionable insights

Using BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables full visibility into the resource usage and patterns to provide actionable right-sizing recommendations based on each customer’s historical and current resource utilization. We are also able to simulate future events such as:

• New user onboarding
• Business events that may increase or decrease resource utilization
• Deployment and data center change preparations

This allows us to allocate the required resources to support our customers’ mission-critical business services using BMC products on-premises. By modeling each service in our products leveraging the BMC Helix platform and the BMC Helix IT Operations Management suite—which includes BMC Helix Discovery integrated with BMC Helix Continuous Optimization—we are further able to correlate business drivers (mission-critical KPIs like “number of logins” or “number of users opening a support ticket”) with system metrics, enabling predictive service assurance, health, and optimization.

Benchmarking once is not enough

Typically, benchmarks are used for sizing applications and resources. These benchmarks are like t-shirt sizing: small, medium, and large. But do all t-shirts fit you the same way? No. When it comes to a perfect-fitting t-shirt, you need a tailored fit.

Benchmarks are set and hopefully revisited occasionally. In a digital world that’s driven by constant change, continuous optimization of resource allocation is a business imperative to staying competitive and maintaining service levels.

Continually optimizing is optimal

As you develop and deploy new services to support the popularity growth of your current offerings, you’ll need to continually assess whether you have the proper sizing for your environment. Too little, performance suffers. Too much, your bottom line suffers.

It’s tedious work to manually model, analyze, and calculate sizing or determining if migrating from on-premises to cloud or from one public cloud provider to another makes sense. More so when you must do it often.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization takes care of the leg work for you:

• Gain visibility across the enterprise, including legacy applications and on-premises, physical, virtual, containerized, Kubernetes, pod, and cloud infrastructure resources.
• Understand the overall health of business services using comprehensive, consolidated views of application and infrastructure metrics to maximize performance and minimize cost. Predictive saturation forecasting helps you avoid failures and slowdowns.
• Deploy applications on time by reserving IT resources when needed.
• Receive actionable risk mitigation and cost savings recommendations for your containerized environments integrated with BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
• Perform advanced what-if simulation analysis for your business services based on the critical KPIs (business drivers) impacting your business.
• Simulate and analyze cloud migrations and Kubernetes workload impact before implementation.

As we continually enhance our BMC Helix solutions (both SaaS and on-premises), BMC Helix Continuous Optimization plays an important role in development and deployment to ensure we deliver an efficient solution to our customers.