In a landscape where the pace of digital transformation is relentless, and the demand for operational excellence is ever-present, ServiceOps emerges not just as a buzzword, but also as a critical enabler for businesses to thrive in the digital age. Building upon the foundational principles outlined in previous blogs, let’s dig into why ServiceOps, a unified approach to IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations (ITOps), matters and why the time to embrace it is now more urgent than ever.

The urgency of ServiceOps

1. Rapidly evolving business landscape: The digital landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with technological advancements, changing customer expectations, and market disruptions reshaping industries overnight. In this dynamic environment, organizations must adapt quickly to stay competitive, making the need for agile and efficient IT management practices more urgent than ever.
2. Increasing complexity and scale: As organizations scale and diversify their operations, the complexity of managing IT services and operations grows exponentially. Traditional siloed approaches to IT management are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern enterprises, necessitating a more integrated and holistic approach like ServiceOps.
3. Growing customer expectations: We are now in an era where the customer experience reigns supreme, so organizations must deliver seamless and reliable services to attract, delight, and retain customers and exceed their expectations. Service disruptions and downtime can have far-reaching consequences, leading to lost revenue, damaged reputation, and customer churn. ServiceOps offers a proactive and collaborative approach to managing IT services, ensuring high availability and reliability to meet customer demands.

Why you should care about ServiceOps

1. Driving business outcomes: ServiceOps is not just about IT—it’s about driving tangible business outcomes. By optimizing processes, automating routine tasks, and fostering collaboration, ServiceOps enables organizations to enhance productivity, improve service quality, and accelerate innovation, ultimately driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
2. Enhancing customer satisfaction: In today’s customer-centric world, delivering exceptional customer experiences is paramount. ServiceOps enables organizations to proactively monitor and manage IT services, minimizing downtime and service disruptions to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Staying ahead of the curve: As digital disruption reshapes industries, organizations that adopt ServiceOps gain a strategic advantage over their competitors by taking a proactive and integrated approach to IT management, quickly adapting to changing market dynamics, and capitalizing on emerging opportunities.

The time is now

1. Seizing the competitive advantage: By implementing ServiceOps early and optimizing IT operations, organizations can gain a competitive advantage in their respective markets, enhancing collaboration and driving innovation to differentiate themselves from competitors and position themselves for long-term success.
2. Minimizing risks and downtime: Service disruptions and downtime can have significant financial and reputational implications for organizations. By adopting ServiceOps practices, organizations can minimize the risk of service disruptions, proactively addressing issues before they escalate and ensuring uninterrupted service delivery.
3. Unlocking growth opportunities: ServiceOps enables organizations to optimize their existing operations and foster a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration to drive innovation, develop new products and services, and capitalize on emerging market trends.

Adopting ServiceOps is not just about staying ahead of the curve—it’s about future-proofing your organization for success in an increasingly digital world through operational excellence, enhanced customer satisfaction, and new opportunities for growth and innovation. The time to act is now. Embrace ServiceOps and embark on a journey towards transformative outcomes and sustainable success in the digital age.

Read more about the adoption of ServiceOps and how you can accelerate and maximize the impact of a converged ITSM/ITOps transformation in the latest e-book from Enterprise Strategy Group.

In today’s world, enterprises must adapt swiftly to changing market dynamics while ensuring operational excellence. Among the various methodologies emerging to meet this challenge, ServiceOps stands out as a beacon of transformation, promising to revolutionize how businesses manage their IT services and operations. A recent e-book by the Enterprise Strategy Group digs into the realm of ServiceOps to uncover its impact on enterprise outcomes and shed light on the journey toward maturity.

Understanding ServiceOps

ServiceOps represents a paradigm shift in IT management, blending the realms of IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations (ITOps) into a unified approach. At its core, ServiceOps emphasizes streamlining processes, automating routine tasks, and utilizing data-driven insights to enhance decision-making and service quality. It’s a technological shift, as well as a cultural and operational transformation to drive efficiency and agility across the enterprise.

Early wins and tangible benefits

Enterprises adopting ServiceOps have witnessed many positive outcomes, ranging from improved staff efficiency to faster incident resolutions and heightened user satisfaction. According to recent Enterprise Strategy Group research findings, leading organizations with mature ServiceOps practices reported significant boosts in staff efficiency, with 94 percent attesting to its impact. Moreover, 93 percent experienced accelerated incident resolutions, while 92 percent noted a marked increase in user satisfaction levels.

The significance of maturity

While the benefits of ServiceOps are apparent, the level of adoption maturity plays a pivotal role in maximizing its impact. Enterprises categorized as leaders in ServiceOps maturity were significantly more likely to report substantial improvements across key metrics than their nascent counterparts. This underscores the importance of advancing along the maturity spectrum to unlock the full potential of ServiceOps.

Challenges and opportunities

Despite the widespread recognition of its potential, the adoption rate for ServiceOps remains relatively slow. The transition from siloed ITSM and ITOps to a unified ServiceOps framework presents formidable challenges, including breaking down entrenched silos and integrating disparate systems. However, with these challenges come immense opportunities for innovation and collaboration, paving the way for a more cohesive and efficient operational model.

The road ahead

As enterprises navigate the complexities of their ServiceOps journey, it is essential to focus on practical best practices gleaned from organizations with mature ServiceOps approaches. By creating hybrid roles, fostering cross-team collaboration, implementing robust tools and processes, and adding automation and AI-driven technologies, enterprises can accelerate their progress toward ServiceOps maturity and unlock unprecedented levels of operational excellence.

In the digital transformation era, ServiceOps emerges as a beacon for enterprises seeking to optimize their IT services and operations. Backed by research and real-world insights, the journey toward ServiceOps maturity holds the promise of enhanced productivity, collaboration, and innovation. As enterprises chart their course towards ServiceOps excellence, embracing a holistic approach rooted in best practices and continuous improvement is key to unlocking transformative outcomes and driving sustainable success in the digital age.

Read more in the full report from Enterprise Strategy Group on accelerating and maximizing the impact of ServiceOps.

In the era of rapid digital transformation, where businesses constantly race for operational excellence, a game-changing methodology has emerged—ServiceOps. This innovative approach not only marks a significant shift in IT management, merging the realms of IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) into a unified framework, but it also brings a host of benefits. So, what exactly is ServiceOps, and why is it becoming a buzzword among forward-thinking organizations?

The essence of ServiceOps

ServiceOps, an abbreviation for service operations, is not just another approach to IT management. It’s a comprehensive strategy that surpasses traditional isolated practices by unifying ITSM and ITOM into a single framework. While ITSM concentrates on managing and delivering IT services in accordance with business requirements, ITOM deals with the day-to-day operational activities needed to maintain IT infrastructure and systems. ServiceOps is more than managing IT services and operations—it’s a comprehensive strategy prioritizing efficiency, collaboration, and innovation.

Key principles of ServiceOps

1. Streamlined processes: ServiceOps isn’t just a theoretical concept. It emphasizes the importance of streamlining processes across the entire service lifecycle, from request to resolution. Organizations can optimize efficiency and reduce operational overhead by standardizing workflows and automating routine tasks, leading to tangible improvements in service delivery.
2. Automation and AI: Automation is a fundamental pillar of ServiceOps, empowering organizations to automate repetitive tasks, such as incident resolution and change management to accelerate service delivery and minimize human error. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics equips organizations with the tools to harness data-driven insights, improve decision-making, and optimize service performance.
3. Proactive monitoring and management: ServiceOps ensures high availability and reliability by leveraging real-time monitoring tools and predictive analytics to proactively monitor and manage IT infrastructure and services so organizations can identify and address potential issues before they impact end users, minimizing downtime and service disruptions.
4. Collaboration and communication: Collaboration lies at the heart of ServiceOps, fostering cross-functional teamwork and communication across ITSM and ITOM teams to break down silos, promote knowledge sharing, drive innovation, and deliver superior customer experiences.
5. Continuous improvement: ServiceOps embraces a culture of continuous improvement, where organizations strive to refine processes, adapt to changing market dynamics, and drive innovation. Through regular feedback loops and performance metrics, organizations can identify areas for optimization and drive incremental gains in productivity and efficiency.

The Impact of ServiceOps

The adoption of ServiceOps can have a profound impact on organizational performance and success. By embracing the principles of integration, automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement, organizations can achieve the following:

• Enhanced Productivity: Streamlined processes and automation increase efficiency and productivity across the organization.
• Improved Service Quality: Proactive monitoring and management ensure high service availability and reliability, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
• Accelerated Innovation: Collaboration and communication foster a culture of innovation, driving the development of new products and services.
• Agile Decision-Making: Data-driven insights enable organizations to make informed decisions quickly, adapt to changing market conditions, and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

ServiceOps represents a transformative approach to IT management, offering organizations a blueprint for success in the digital age. By integrating ITSM and ITOM into a unified framework and adopting integration, automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement principles, organizations can drive operational excellence, enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve sustainable growth. As businesses navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, ServiceOps emerges as a guiding light, empowering organizations to thrive in an increasingly competitive market.

To learn more about ServiceOps and how it can revolutionize your business, check out this latest study from the Enterprise Strategy Group and visit our dedicated ServiceOps hub.

Today, more than ever, efficient asset management is crucial for businesses across industries. Tracking and optimizing IT assets, from hardware and software to virtual resources and cloud-based services, can significantly impact operational efficiency, cost optimization, and risk mitigation. However, businesses often face challenges in effectively managing their assets, resulting in increased costs, compliance risks, and operational inefficiencies.

Challenges in asset management

Without a clear understanding of the assets that are being used to deliver a particular service, organizations may struggle to ensure that the service meets customer expectations. Despite recognizing the importance of asset management, many organizations face challenges when tracking and managing assets in their environment:

1. Lack of visibility: Traditional asset management approaches often rely on manual processes, spreadsheets, or disparate tools, leading to limited visibility into the organization’s IT infrastructure. This results in inaccurate or outdated asset data, making it difficult to track assets, understand dependencies, and plan for maintenance or upgrades.
2. Inefficient resource utilization: Organizations often struggle with underutilized or idle assets, which leads to unnecessary costs. Without proper visibility and monitoring, it becomes difficult to identify such assets and optimize resource allocation, resulting in wasted resources and increased operational expenses.
3. License compliance risks: Managing software licenses and ensuring compliance with licensing agreements is complex. Manual license tracking methods can lead to compliance risks, including overuse or non-compliance, resulting in potential penalties or legal consequences.
4. Lack of proactive maintenance: Each of the above challenges presents issues for organizations when they try to proactively manage their IT infrastructure. Without accurate asset data and insights, they cannot identify potential risks, security vulnerabilities, or outdated components, which can lead to increased downtime, security breaches, and business disruptions.

Revolutionizing asset management

This is where BMC Helix Discovery steps in as a game-changer, provides comprehensive—and revolutionary—asset management capabilities to address these challenges:

1. Automated asset discovery and visibility: BMC Helix Discovery automates the discovery and mapping of IT assets across the organization’s infrastructure. It leverages advanced technologies like agentless discovery and pattern-based recognition to capture detailed information about hardware, software, virtual resources, and cloud-based services. This automation provides real-time visibility into the complete asset inventory, enabling accurate tracking, relationship mapping, and dependency understanding.
2. Optimal resource allocation: The solution helps identify idle resources and provides actionable insights for consolidation, retirement, or repurposing. This optimization streamlines resource allocation, reduces operational costs, and maximizes the utilization of IT assets.
3. License compliance management: BMC Helix Discovery simplifies license management by providing a holistic view of software licenses, entitlements, deployments, and usage. It enables organizations to track license compliance, identify unused or underutilized licenses, and ensure adherence to licensing agreements. With accurate license data, organizations can avoid compliance risks, eliminate unnecessary software purchases, and optimize licensing costs.
4. Proactive maintenance and risk mitigation: BMC Helix Discovery empowers organizations to proactively manage their IT infrastructure. By capturing comprehensive asset data, including configurations, patch levels, and vulnerabilities, it enables proactive maintenance and risk mitigation. Organizations can identify potential risks, security vulnerabilities, or end-of-life components. This empowers them to plan for hardware and software upgrades, patches, and replacements proactively, minimizing risks, and reducing unplanned downtime.

Efficient asset management is a critical component of business success in the digital era. BMC Helix Discovery revolutionizes asset management practices and helps organizations overcome their asset management challenges by providing automated asset discovery, comprehensive, real-time visibility, optimal resource allocation, license compliance management, and proactive maintenance capabilities.

These capabilities enable organizations to achieve operational efficiency, optimize costs, enhance decision-making, and improve business continuity, ultimately unlocking the full potential of their IT assets to achieve success in today’s dynamic and technology-driven business landscape.

To learn more about BMC Helix Discovery, visit www.bmc.com/Discovery.

Amid the rapidly evolving financial industry, meeting compliance regulations is a critical business concern. Failure to comply with banking regulations can result in severe fines, civil suits, and personal consequences for executives. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of compliance regulations for financial institutions and how BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can help organizations effectively navigate these challenges.

The significance of compliance regulations

Compliance regulations are designed to maintain the stability and integrity of the financial system, protect customers, and reduce the risk of financial crises. However, different countries have their own banking regulations, and financial institutions worldwide face the challenge of meeting these requirements. Failing to comply with audits and regulations can lead to substantial fines and legal consequences.

To highlight the gravity of non-compliance, let’s consider some real-world examples. In recent years, several banks around the globe faced significant fines, such as one in Malaysia with $700 million, one in Holland with $574 million, and Capital One in the United States with $390 million. These fines have far-reaching implications, affecting both the organizations and the executives responsible.

Specifically for North America, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) provides guidelines for capacity management, including technology planning, capacity assessments, stress testing, business continuity planning, vendor management, and performance monitoring. Meeting these guidelines is crucial for financial institutions to ensure compliance and avoid penalties.

Industry trends and IT decision makers

Financial institutions are experiencing a paradigm shift, recognizing the power of data for making informed business decisions. Organizations aim to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to interpret and analyze data more effectively. According to a recent study by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 90 percent of organizations surveyed are expected to spend as much or more on AI/ML in 2023 as they had in 2022.

The financial industry also demands enhanced visibility into resource usage and the ability to forecast and meet changing business demands. However, many organizations struggle with manual efforts, lack of visibility, and managing complex infrastructures. To address these challenges, organizations require a comprehensive solution that offers holistic visibility, automation capabilities, and the ability to align resources with business services.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization for financial institutions

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization is a powerful solution that helps financial institutions meet compliance regulations, optimize capacity, and drive operational efficiency. This solution caters to the unique needs of the financial sector, empowering organizations to streamline their capacity management process effectively, while offering additional capabilities such as cloud migration simulations, application capacity management, forecasting, and saturation prediction and planning.

Customers who have implemented the solution have significantly reduced person-hours through automation, achieved cost savings and avoidance, ensured compliance with regulations, and gained a comprehensive view of their infrastructure and applications. They have also prevented capacity-related outages and application slowdowns and bottlenecks, while the AI/ML capabilities have helped them make better data-driven decisions, predict potential issues, and optimize their resources effectively.

Conclusion

Compliance regulations play a crucial role in maintaining the stability and integrity of financial institutions. With the ever-changing landscape of the financial industry, organizations must leverage advanced solutions like BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to navigate these regulations successfully. By adopting this solution, financial institutions can achieve compliance, optimize capacity, mitigate risks, and drive operational efficiency.

The out-of-the-box features, AI-powered analytics, and comprehensive reporting provided by BMC Helix Continuous Optimization make it a valuable asset for financial institutions striving to meet compliance requirements and thrive in today’s dynamic financial landscape.

Financial institutions that have embraced BMC Helix Continuous Optimization have experienced numerous benefits, including cost savings, improved compliance, risk mitigation, and enhanced resource alignment. With BMC’s proven track record in capacity management and continuous innovation, organizations can rely on this solution to navigate the complex challenges of the financial industry.

To learn more about how BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can empower your financial institution to meet compliance regulations and optimize capacity, visit www.bmc.com/optimize and listen to the webinar that I recently did on this important topic.

IT teams cannot manage what they cannot see, and that challenge is made more complex when trying to manage IT assets across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, while also supporting DevOps teams and managing containerized and microservices-based application delivery.

BMC Helix Discovery, an industry-leading SaaS-based, cloud-native discovery and dependency mapping system, can solve these issues by delivering instant visibility across your entire IT estate. A recently released Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact^™ (TEI) study commissioned by BMC found benefits culminating in a return on investment (ROI) of a significant 314 percent.

Before their implementation of BMC Helix Discovery, participants in the study were managing assets with legacy and homegrown solutions and manual processes, which led to security breaches, a lack of visibility, and outdated information, as well as high costs and inefficient processes. By implementing the solution and gaining end-to-end visibility, the composite organization comprised of interviewees with experience using BMC Helix Discovery realized benefits that include:

• Improved IT productivity: By gaining better visibility into the IT asset ecosystem and achieving accurate, real-time data, organizations netted $684,000 worth of increased IT team productivity related to managing assets and infrastructures.
• More efficient IT asset incident resolution and recovery: By leveraging the solution’s better-quality data to identify the root cause of incidents and reduce time spent resolving them, end users avoided downtime worth $ 2.8 million.
• Better IT asset optimization: Improved visibility helped organizations avoid the licensing fees and costs associated with managing unused assets, saving $2.5 million.
• Improved IT asset security: By mitigating risk and improving their overall security posture with better visibility, organizations realized security improvements worth $1.2 million.

In addition to the quantifiable benefits of BMC Helix Discovery, the organizations in the study credited the solution with helping them grow their business alongside managing their complex IT infrastructures. To learn more about how BMC Helix Discovery can help your business increase IT team productivity, remediate and recover IT assets faster, and improve IT asset optimization and security, download the full study here.

And… Consider watching the webinar with BMC experts and guest speaker, Forrester Analyst Will McKeon-White as they discussed how BMC Helix Discovery delivers rapid ROI, automates asset management, and reduces IT burden.

SOAPs – Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms – represent the emergence of an enterprise orchestration engine that spans diverse applications and infrastructures.

As noted in the recently published Gartner^® report, “SOAPs enable I&O leaders to design and implement business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure.”*

Our takeaway is that Gartner expects SOAPs to function as the single orchestration point for managing and executing automation tasks across the enterprise and recommends that Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders invest in SOAPs to drive digital innovation and business agility.

What is driving the need for SOAPs?

Organizations continually seek to improve cost and efficiency as they scale. SOAPs hold the promise of delivering on those improvements with predictability and reliability.

Traditional job scheduling and workload automation tools have failed to keep pace with the speed and complexity of digital business. Gartner predicts that “By year-end 2025, 80% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using SOAPs to orchestrate workloads across IT and business domains.” ”*

While tactical IT automation met the near-term needs for reducing manual effort and its associated errors and costs, SOAPs go beyond this minimum to orchestrating much more complicated event-driven workflows both inside and outside of IT.

What are the elements of a SOAP?

As per our understanding, Gartner identifies six key capabilities of a SOAP:

1. Application workflow orchestration to create and manage workflows across multiple applications both on-premises and in the cloud.
2. Event-driven automation to simplify IT processes involving manual steps or scripting.
3. Scheduling, monitoring, visibility, and alerting to enable real-time capabilities and improve SLAs.
4. Self-service automation to empower business users, developers, and others to orchestrate their own jobs.
5. Resource provisioning of both on-premises and cloud-based compute, network, and storage resources.
6. Managing data pipelines from automating file transfers to orchestrating the ingestion and processing of multiple data streams.

Whether available from the cloud or on-prem, SOAPs are likely to include a central administrative console, scheduling engine, workflow designer, agents for executing automation tasks, and a self-service mobile app for users. Additional capabilities may include support for machine learning algorithms and REST APIs that invoke orchestration programmatically.

What SOAPs are not

The number of automation tools is growing rapidly but they are not all designed for the solving the same problem. SOAPs Market Guide emphasizes this for two areas of automation, DevOps tools and RPA (Robotic Process Automation. Included below are some quotes from the Market Guide explaining how Gartner differentiates between these automation categories.

“SOAPs expand the role of traditional workload automation by adapting to use cases that deliver and extend into data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructure and application architectures. These tools complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide customer-focused agility and to cost savings, operational efficiency and process standardization.” .” (Page 2)

“SOAPs provide a unified administration console and an orchestration engine to manage workloads and data pipelines and to enable event-driven application workflows. Most tools expose APIs enabling scheduling batch processes, monitoring task statuses and alerting users when new events are triggered and can be integrated into DevOps pipelines to increase delivery velocity.”

“SOAPs will not replace or replicate automation functionality in other domains, such as infrastructure automation, SaaS management, DevOps toolchains or Robotic Process Automation. Rather, they aim to be a single orchestration point to make the development, execution, routing and delegation of automation tasks as needed, both from and to these other domain automation platforms.”

“These platforms are complementary to automation platforms such as digital platform conductors for orchestrating workload placement across a hybrid delivery topology or RPA platforms for both interaction and API-enablement of legacy systems. The interaction of SOAPs with hyperautomation approaches is similarly complementary, extending SOAP value in the increasingly complex automation use cases.”

What is the future for SOAPs?

The orchestration and automation of IT processes and services, and application and data workflows, are evolving and coalescing into platforms that extend the boundaries of traditional scheduling, monitoring, and service delivery tools.

As organizations modernize their I&O practices, we see that I&O leaders should evaluate SOAP vendors based on:

• “Prioritize support for orchestrating cloud-native applications and infrastructure during SOAP selection to prepare for cloud migration or integration with IaaS or SaaS workloads.”
  • The depth and breadth of native integrations
  • Customer support and long-term viability of the provider

SOAPs remain an evolving market, representing the transformation of a mature market for workload automation tools to meet modern infrastructure, application, data and business process requirements.”

* Gartner, Market Guide for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, by Analysts Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts, Hassan Ennaciri, published 23 January 2023 – ID

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from BMC.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

In today’s world, networks are no longer confined to on-premises environments alone; they have evolved into complex hybrid configurations that encompass on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and edge environments. These network architectures provide increased flexibility, scalability, and agility but they also pose significant challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining comprehensive visibility and control. Without this visibility, it is akin to operating in the dark. A comprehensive, holistic understanding of your IT and network infrastructure isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity.

The repercussions of not having this understanding are manifold:

• Security vulnerabilities: Unknown or unmanaged assets can become potential gateways for cyberattacks, leading to substantial security risks.
• Increased business disruption risk: Without clear visibility, diagnosing and addressing issues take longer, resulting in service disruptions that negatively affect the customer experience. In today’s highly competitive business environment, any slip in customer service can lead to lost business and damage to your brand’s reputation.
• Compliance risks: Failing to account for all IT assets can result in non-compliance with regulatory standards, potentially leading to penalties and reputational damage.
• Cost inefficiencies: Lack of visibility can lead to ballooning IT costs, particularly when unused or underused assets go unnoticed.

The solution—BMC Helix Discovery

BMC Helix Discovery is an industry-leading, comprehensive, and agentless discovery technology that offers enterprises a holistic view of their IT infrastructure. One of the solution’s key strengths is its extensive reach: It can discover and map all kinds of applications deployed by enterprises, from legacy mainframes and monolithic applications to the latest cloud-native architectures. No matter where or how the applications are deployed, BMC Helix Discovery ensures complete visibility across your entire IT landscape. With out-of-the-box coverage for tens of thousands of hardware, software, and application entities, it fast tracks the journey to beneficial outcomes for enterprises.

Positive outcomes

Adopting BMC Helix Discovery can revolutionize an organization’s IT landscape, leading to several benefits:

• Improved security and compliance: A comprehensive view of the IT landscape, including unknown or unmanaged assets, allows enterprises to identify and rectify potential vulnerabilities, mitigate security risks, and ensure regulatory compliance.
• Enhanced visibility: Automated discovery provides an accurate, dynamic inventory of IT assets, driving operational efficiencies and ensuring no resource is left unutilized or unprotected.
• Reduced business risk: Enhanced visibility allows for quicker identification and resolution of issues within the IT infrastructure and minimizes the risks posed by prolonged service disruptions, system downtime, and potential security breaches.
• Increased cost efficiency: The discovery and decommissioning of unused or under-utilized assets lead to significant reductions in IT spending.

In conclusion, the benefits of BMC Helix Discovery extend far beyond just overcoming the challenge of visibility, providing businesses with the actionable insights to make informed decisions, reduce risk, improve security, drive growth, and transform their IT operations. To learn more about BMC Helix Discovery, visit bmc.com/Discovery.

This use case will demonstrate how to restart any Windows service using BMC Helix Intelligent Automation with the TrueSight Orchestration connector to help manage all of your IT assets.

Use Case

When a Windows Service down alert comes into BMC Helix Operations Management, the service is restarted automatically using BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.

• In this use case, we are using TrueSight Orchestration (TSO) as the automation tool for Out-of-the-box TSO event orchestration runbook adapters and modules.
• The BMC Helix Intelligent Automation Policy triggers the TSO workflow to remotely restart the Windows service.
• The Windows service gets restarted successfully and the event is closed in BMC Helix Operations Management.
• For this use case, we are restarting the Print Spooler service on a Windows server as an example to demonstrate the flow.

The Event Orchestration Runbook Configuration

The adapters needed for this use case are shown below.

Reference: https://docs.bmc.com/docs/TruesightOrchestrationContent/231/installing-the-event-orchestration-runbook-1192637229.html

The modules needed for this use case are shown below.

Event Orchestration Module Configuration for BMC Helix Monitor

You will need to make changes for the attributes highlighted below.

Event Orchestration Credential Store Configuration

Please provide the correct Windows credentials, as shown below.

BMC Helix Intelligent Automation

The screens below show the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation Connector, which needs to be configured from the console.

Reference: https://docs.bmc.com/docs/helixintelligentautomation/232/configuring-the-truesight-orchestration-connector-1191808192.html

Policy Configuration: BMC Helix Intelligent Automation

You will need to configure the BMC Helix Intelligent Automation policy from the Policies tab.

Click on “Select Action” to get the page below.

Remember to click on “Sync Actions.”

Next, you can search for “Event_Orchestration Process Event” in the Search Actions field.

Follow the steps below to complete the policy configuration.

This completes the policy creation.

Please refer to the below link to download the presentation for this Blog Article.

Restart a Windows Service

We have recorded a Video showing the working of this Use Case and required configuration. This can be obtained upon request through email to the Authors.

ipsita_priyadarshini@bmc.com

sayan_banerjee@bmc.com

Conclusion

Enterprise applications require these workflows to identify and remediate critical events happening in their infrastructure. This use case help organizations manage the end-to-end infrastructure in an effective way with the least impact to the business.

In order to minimize the impact to end users and the business, IT operations (ITOps) teams need to know about any IT infrastructure (e.g., data center resources, networks, multicloud services, etc.) or application issues as quickly as possible. Dashboards are a quick and effective way to see live data and can help ITOps teams quickly identify an issue and take action.

While most dashboards allow you to easily plot multiple attributes for a single service, most ITOps teams manage a large number of services—each with its own set of interdependencies—making it difficult to monitor the health of all services, identify a problem, and isolate the root cause. In such cases, users have historically needed to manually switch between interrelated reports in order to analyze the impact, which is incredibly tedious and time-consuming.

What is BMC Helix Dashboards?

A software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool on the BMC Helix Portal, BMC Helix Dashboards offers unified reporting and gives you a consolidated view of data from all applications across your environment. You can easily create, export, and share interactive dashboards with both internal and external users based on user roles and permissions. The dashboards are easy to read and easy to understand, making collaboration between teams faster. An intuitive dashboard layout allows for everyone from a new site reliability engineer (SRE) all the way up to the chief technology or information officer (CTO/CIO) to share the same dashboard view.

For even greater benefits and insights you can use BMC Helix Discovery, a cloud-native discovery and dependency mapping solution, in tandem with BMC Helix Dashboards to more efficiently manage your infrastructure. This dynamic service modeling tool provides visibility into hardware, software, and service dependencies across cloud and on-premises environments, which in turn fuels BMC Helix Dashboards with a comprehensive view of all services.

BMC’s IT team, for example, manages 28 business services and 471 technical services. With BMC Helix Dashboards and BMC Helix Discovery, we can get the health status of all business and technical services in a single dashboard and identify impacted services in real time.

While there are many use cases that BMC Helix Dashboards can deliver on its own as a standalone tool, in this blog post I am going to talk about two real-life examples that demonstrate how BMC Helix Dashboards, along with BMC Helix Discovery, can make ITOps teams’ jobs much easier.

Use Case 1: See the top impacted services in a single view

The dashboard below shows the top five impacted business and technical services (due to open events) and an associated health score:

Figure 1. This dashboard shows the top five impacted business and technical services.

It has a heatmap view of services impacted in red and not impacted in green. In this example, we have included the top five services impacted, but the solution can be configured for any number of services and ordered by open events, health score, etc.

These are the resources required to create the dashboard view above:

1. Data sources: Since the BMC Helix data source doesn’t contain service name details directly in the Event/Metric query types, we also need to add the BMC Helix API data source, which is used to fetch the mapping of ServiceID and Service Name from the SmartGraph REST API. So, add the two data sources below in the dashboard:

1. 1. BMC Helix: This will fetch event and metric data by ServiceID.
   2. BMC Helix API: This will fetch the mapping of Service Name and ServiceID from the SmartGraph REST API.

2. Transformations: Use the following transformation options to process the data fetched from the above data sources:

1. 1. Outer join: Use the ServiceID column to join data from the above two data sources.
   2. Filter data by values: Exclude null values after join.
   3. Sort by: Sort by event count.

3. Visualization plugins: Use the following visualization plugins to visualize the data:

1. 1. Bar gauge: Shows the top five impacted services as a bar gauge in descending order.
   2. Stat: Shows individual business service status as red or green.

4. Dashboard filters: N/A

Find detailed steps below to create this dashboard:

1. Login to BMC Helix Dashboards (user must have Reporting Admin or Reporting Editor role)
2. Navigate to Home > Dashboards > New dashboard > Add new panel to create a new dashboard.
3. Select Data source as Mixed, first data source as BMC Helix, Query type as Events, and other details as shown in the snapshot below:

Query: (!status:CLOSED AND !status:BLACKOUT) AND (severity:MINOR OR severity:MAJOR severity:CRITICAL ) AND !class:ABNORMALITY OR !class: INCIDENT_INFO AND (!msg:”SGE:[PATROL]- DB Backup impacted with long running Save Session on Servers”)

This query will pull any events that impact the health status of any service, grouping the events count by ServiceID, and can be modified based on the criteria defined for impacted events.

4. Click on the + Query icon to add one more data source and select Data source as BMC Helix API.
5. Click on the Path tab and add the following details:
   1. HTTP Request type: GET
   2. Path URL: /smart-graph-api/api/v1.2/data/search

6. Click on the Params tab and add the following three parameters:
   1. Format: object
   2. Query: SEARCH BusinessService SHOW name
   3. Limit: 1000

This will call the SmartGraph REST API with a query to search all business services and get each one’s Service Name and ServiceID. By default, the SmartGraph REST API returns only 100 rows, so make sure to add a limit parameter to get all rows.

7. Click on the Fields tab of the data source and add two fields to extract Service Names and ServiceIDs from the REST API response, as shown in the below snapshot:

8. Select Visualizations plugin as BAR gauge and make other configuration changes (e.g., Color scheme, Orientation, etc.):

Visualization	Value options	Color scheme

9. Add one more panel to show the Technical Services details in a similar way by repeating steps 3 to 8 with only one change in the step 6 query, as follows: SEARCH TechnicalService SHOW name.
10. Add two more similar panels for Services impacted by health score by repeating steps 3 to 9 with the below change in step 3 (here we selected the Query type as Metric instead of Events and other details as shown below):

This query fetches health score metric data for all services.

Your new dashboard showing a health overview of all your services in a single-page view is now ready.

Use Case 2: Compare multiple services in a single view to identify common problem areas

Consider another use case where an IT team has already identified the top impacted business and technical services from the above dashboard view (Use Case 1). Now, they can drill down and find out if any common problem areas exist between the impacted services by comparing different service metrics (e.g., health score, open events, incidents, etc.) for a given period.

The dashboard below compares the health scores of selected services and can be extended to include other metrics:

Figure 2. This dashboard compares the health scores of selected services.

Below, find the resources required to create the dashboard above:

1. Data sources: Add the following data sources to fetch the dashboard data:

1. 1. BMC Helix: This will fetch Health Score metric data for selected Services by ServiceID.
   2. BMC Helix API: This will fetch the mapping of Service Name and ServiceID from the SmartGraph REST API.

2. Transformations: Add the following transformation options to process the data fetched from the above data sources:

1. 1. Outer join: Use the ServiceID column to join data from the above two data sources.
   2. Filter data by values: Exclude null values after join.
   3. Sort by: Sort by health score.

3. Visualization plugins: Use the following visualization plugins to visualize the data:

1. 1. Timeline: Shows health score data on a graph over a specified date and time range.
   2. Table: Shows the Service Name for each ServiceID.
   3. Row: Groups the two plugins above as a single entity and adds a repeat option, so that health score data is populated for all selected services.

4. Dashboard filters: Select the following dashboard filter variables:
   1. Timeline: Shows health score data on a graph over a specified date and time range.
   2. ServiceID (hidden): This will fetch the ServiceIDs of the selected service names and pass them to BMC Helix data source queries in the dashboard panels.

Find detailed steps below to create this dashboard:

1. Login to BMC Helix Dashboards (user must have Reporting Admin or Reporting Editor role).
2. Navigate to Home > Dashboards > New dashboard > Add new panel to create new dashboard.
3. Click on the dashboard’s Settings icon at the top right and then select the Variables tab. Add a variable with the name “ServiceName” to get a service names list from a SmartGraph query. Select the following options for the variable:
   1. Data source: BMC Helix
   2. Query: smartgraph,{“query” : “SEARCH TechnicalService, BusinessService SHOW name”, “displayName” :”name”}
   3. Make sure to enable “Multi-value” and the “Include All” option.

Refer to the screenshot below for more details:

4. Add one more variable with the name “ServiceID” Select the following options for the variable:
   1. Data source: BMC Helix
   2. Query: smartgraph, {“query” : “SEARCH TechnicalService, BusinessService WHERE name IN [${ServiceName:singlequote:csv}] SHOW #id”, “displayName”:”#id”}

Here, we are using the following Grafana variable formatting options:

• singlequote, which adds a single quote to each service name value.
• csv, which adds a comma after each service name.

c. Make sure to enable “Multi-value” and the “Include All” option.

Refer to the screenshot below for more details:

5. Add a new row panel; in Settings, select Repeat for as “ServiceID” and click on Update:

6. Add a new panel inside the above row panel with details as below:
   1. Visualization plugin: Table
   2. Data source: BMC Helix API

7. Click on the Path tab of the BMC Helix API data source and add the following details:
   1. HTTP Request type: GET
   2. Path URL: /smart-graph-api/api/v1.2/data/search

8. Click on the Params tab and add the following three parameters:
   1. Format: object
   2. Query: SEARCH TechnicalService WHERE #id IN [${ServiceID:singlequote:csv:Percentencode}] SHOW name
   3. Limit: 1000

9. Click on the Fields tab and add the following details:
   1. Field: $.results[*].name
   2. JSON function: JSONata
   3. Type: String
   4. Alias: Service Name

10. Add another panel inside the row panel:
    1. Visualization type: Timeline
    2. Data source: BMC Helix
    3. Query type: Metric
    4. Query: ({__name__=”HealthScore_value” , serviceId=”$ServiceID”, nodeId=””}) or ({__name__=”HealthScore_value” , serviceId=”$ServiceID”, nodeId=””})[90d]

Refer to the screenshot below for more details:

11. Apply the changes, resize the panels as per the dashboard view, and save the dashboard.

Now, the user can select multiple services from the dashboard filter, and the health score data for the selected services will be shown in a single view.

Next steps

This article highlights two BMC Helix Dashboards use cases that show data from multiple services in a single view, but they can be modified to create many similar dashboards.

BMC Helix Dashboards provides out-of-the-box dashboards for common use cases for different BMC Helix solutions. Service Dashboard is one such out-of-the-box dashboard that can be used to design more service dashboard use cases. Users can further customize these dashboards based on their unique requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about BMC Helix Dashboards and how to streamline service monitoring at your organization, I recommend checking out the Introduction to BMC Helix Dashboards webinar, followed by the BMC Helix Dashboards ITSM Best Practices webinar, for a good overview.