AIOps Blog

BMC Helix Containerized Monitor Agent: Next Wave of Monitoring Evolution

Shipping Containers Cargo
3 minute read
Jithesh Padikkal

In the modern era of application development, customers are widely adopting a containerized, micro-services-based architecture for all their business needs. However, most of the monitoring solutions and data collectors out there in the market still rely on a server-based monolithic architecture that does not meet the monitoring requirements of these dynamic environments.

At BMC, we constantly focus on our customer and partner pain points and how we can best support their digital transformation. We’re delighted to share the addition of BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized to the BMC Helix family to help our customers monitor their dynamic infrastructure changes. Before we dive into specifics of BMC Helix Monitor Agent, here is a glimpse at containerized solutions and their advantages.

Container technology involves encapsulating or packaging up software code and all its dependencies so that it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure. The technology is quickly maturing, resulting in measurable benefits for developers and operations teams as well as overall software infrastructure that include:

  • Agility—Start, create, replicate, or destroy containers in seconds
  • Portability—run anywhere
  • Resource efficiency and density
  • Container isolation and resource sharing
  • High scalability

BMC has more than three decades of rich monitoring experience in infrastructure, public cloud, databases, applications, and more. BMC Helix Monitor Agent is a lightweight, containerized collector that is pre-configured and ready to be deployed for monitoring with support for vendor-agnostic public cloud monitoring, infrastructure, and database monitoring.

Key benefits:

  • Unified agent for various monitoring
  • Enterprise-grade performance
  • Zero agent configuration
  • Knowledge modules (KMs) are already deployed within the container
  • Enables alarming using out-of-the-box BMC Helix Operations Management policies
  • Highly scalable and reliable
  • Enterprise-grade high availability
  • Seamless upgrades

The diagram below depicts the wide variety of monitoring provided by BMC Helix Monitor Agent:

 

Helix Monitor Agent

Figure 1. BMC Helix Monitor Agent

How do I consume this containerized image?

In the BMC Helix Operations Management Console, go to Administration à Repository, and click on the image highlighted below:

Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized

Figure 2. BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized

How do I deploy this?

  • The downloaded image should be copied to the Kubernetes cluster-accessible controller/bastion system.
  • Pull the image from BMC Docker Trusted Repository (DTR) using the access token.
  • Values.yaml file must be updated with required inputs for the deployment.
  • Trigger deployment with the Helm command.

How do I identify the containerized agent in BMC Helix Operations Management?

In the BMC Helix Operations Management console, go to Configuration → Agents. The file versions that end with a “c” represent BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized agents.

Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized file structure

Figure 3. Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized file structure

How do I upgrade BMC Helix Monitor Agent?

  • The existing version of the container must be destroyed.
  • Create a new container with the latest version of BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
  • Make sure the published host name is same as the existing host name.

Key considerations:

  • Port 3181 is not exposed outside the container. Therefore, no PatrolCli or console connection is possible from the host computer or within the container.
  • You cannot change or re-configure the default account for BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
  • A KM push is not supported.
  • You cannot modify the container contents after deployment.
  • You cannot restart BMC Helix Monitor Agent.

To learn more about containers, please visit these BMC blogs.

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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Jithesh Padikkal

Jithesh Padikkal (JP) is a passionate, value-driven Product Manager with experience leading the planning, building, launching and managing enterprise SAAS and on-premises solutions.

He has over 15 years of experience in the industry, with an excellent blend of technical solutioning, consulting and management skills with proven expertise in information technology (IT) and the internet of things (IoT) converged operations, observability, automations and various AIOps solutions.