Service Management Blog

A Day in the Life: How BMC Helix Transforms ITSM

3 minute read
Dee-Dee Atta

Experience is everything in today’s digital world. End users expect fast, accurate responses to their requests and questions—or they will move on to another source of information or services. Delivering an exceptional experience is especially critical for IT service desk teams supporting employees and partners who need reliable access to resources and applications to remain productive.

IT service desks often become burdened with too many tickets and requests, which quickly become difficult to manage with manual approaches. For current customers using Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution, there is a better way to resolve issues and empower end users with faster, more accurate problem resolution. BMC Helix ITSM transforms and modernizes the ITSM lifecycle by bringing teams together and leveraging intelligent automation to accelerate problem identification and resolution.

BMC Helix ITSM can help IT and business users prioritize and resolve incidents by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to quickly determine the root cause of a problem, identify events related to the incident, and reduce recovery times for multiple end users.

BMC Helix ITSM does this by automatically collecting topology data using BMC Helix Discovery, which populates the configuration management database, BMC Helix CMDB, with infrastructure, software, server, and other relevant configuration items. With this level of detail about the environment, the solution can pinpoint issues and understand which services and users will be impacted.

Here are examples of how BMC Helix ITSM empowers users across the enterprise to resolve issues and enables greater team collaboration.

Site reliability engineer (SRE)

An SRE is responsible for maintaining and improving the reliability of systems in production, fixing issues, and responding to incidents. Without proper tools to monitor service health, SREs often struggle to understand the root cause of a problem and cannot gain visibility into its impact.

BMC Helix ITSM’s service-centric monitoring console provides SREs with a clear view of any problems. When the solution receives hundreds of events impacting different components of a service, it uses AI/ML to identify the causal nodes behind an event. BMC Helix ITSM can trigger actions to automatically or manually remediate incidents, such as restarting a server or extending a file system that’s full; it will then automatically close related events once the situation is resolved.

Line of business (LoB) users

BMC Helix ITSM can also help business users who rely on applications to help them perform their day-to-day operations efficiently. Typically, when there is an issue, business users request support, but they lack an intuitive reporting and support platform and often experience long wait times, which leads to a negative user experience.

The solution empowers business users to handle issues directly, with access to a knowledge base and self-service tools, or by opening a ticket, if needed. And it communicates known issues to business users, helping minimize ticket duplication, which helps reduce the stress on IT service desk agents.

IT service desk agents

Service desk agents serve as the point of contact for customers, end users, and DevOps change requests. They are often challenged by a lack of real-time incident correlation, reactive problem resolution, and working with multiple, siloed teams.

With BMC Helix ITSM, service desk agents can manage a problem in an agile manner using real-time incident correlation and proactive problem management. The solution’s ML capabilities perform analysis based on the history of incidents and create problem management clusters, which reduce the likelihood that this same issue will cause performance incidents in the future.

DevOps engineers

DevOps engineers drive small feature releases based on feedback to help ensure fewer software failures. DevOps teams receive change requests from service desk agents and integrate changes seamlessly across the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) lifecycle. DevOps engineers want to ensure that feature releases or updated software changes do not impact service and application performance, but they can often experience a lack of coordination across an ecosystem.

With BMC Helix ITSM, a service desk agent can request that DevOps restore the previous configuration, which requires a manual approval of the change. The SRE can now see on the solution’s dashboard that the service is restored and performing as expected. Related issues are closed, and business is back to normal. BMC Helix ITSM delivers actionable information relevant to each of the roles above, providing the necessary context and information about how to resolve a problem by initiating a request for action or launching an automated action.

Take a Closer Look at BMC Helix ITSM

The real payoff for BMC Helix ITSM happens when the solution enables deeper collaboration and gives end users access to insights so they can resolve their own issues, get relevant information for their day-to-day jobs, and remain productive without waiting for a response to their ticket.

Are you ready to transform your approach to IT service management, speed problem resolution, elevate the employee experience, and improve IT productivity? Take the BMC Helix ITSM Guided Tour to see the solution in action.

Discover what BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management can do for you

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management ensures that IT and non-IT lines of business come together to work smoothly, reduce risk, and prevent points of failure. Everywhere. Every time. For every user. Learn how your enterprise can simplify complexity across the entire case management lifecycle through personalized digital employee experiences, collaborative work management, intelligent automation, unified DevOps tooling, and predictive AI/ML powered by AIOps.


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

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About the author

Dee-Dee Atta

Dee-Dee is a Solutions Marketing Director in the BMC Digital Service and Operations Management organization. Dee-Dee has previously held marketing leadership roles with VMware, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Cisco.