Share your experience using OPS/MVS Automation Intelligence

My main use case for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is to identify the probable root cause whenever anything goes down. Noise reduction is also one of the main use cases. Additionally, it works as a manager of managers, integrating all the monitoring solutions which are working in silos and bringing all the data into one single pane so I can have complete visibility, leading to a very high level of observability. Another use case is business service models, which involves dynamic service modeling and service impact management, showing exactly where business services are impacted. I can also add one more use case related to automation and remediation, so whenever there is an incident, automation policies can be set up with the automation orchestrator tool ready, allowing commands to be sent via policies to run automation when a repeated incident occurs.

While working with one of my customers, we encountered a scenario where they had multiple monitoring solutions like Dynatrace and AppDynamics, as well as a network monitoring solution, Entuity, and another infrastructure monitoring solution, Microsoft SCOM, while also working with Azure and AWS. Although all these solutions are great, they were still working in silos, so no one had a clear picture of what was exactly going on. I integrated all the solutions with BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps via intelligent integrations, fetching metrics and events from these solutions. In parallel, I built business models using the business service model blueprint from BMC Discovery. Once these business models were published to AIOps along with the collected metrics and events, AI baselining started working on these metrics, generating anomaly events. All the data collected from the third-party solutions started showing up in BMC Helix Operations Management, also known as BHOM. From here, I accessed all the data via AIOps, which clearly identified the causal node or causal host or causal entity causing the business impact. Additionally, I built interactive drill-down dashboards in BMC Helix Dashboards specifically for the CIOs, allowing them to view everything going on in one single dashboard without needing to log into multiple solutions.

BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps has positively impacted my organization by reducing the number of incidents. There used to be a lot of incidents and noise at both the event and incident level, but now the noise has significantly decreased. As a result, people can focus more on solving problems efficiently, reducing the meantime to repair or resolve an issue. The time consumed is much less now, and I have more resources available, as previously manual troubleshooting and task performance consumed a lot of time. Now, I can run automation policies to handle events promptly, which accelerates issue resolution. The noise in incidents has also diminished, allowing resources to work on new project initiatives due to saved time. Additionally, the systems have much higher uptime now than before, as operations are functioning more proactively with regular alerts, enabling quick identification and resolution of customer issues.

The best features BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps offers include its in-built AIML algorithm, which automatically groups all events into a single event and correlates them into a single event, referred to as situations, effectively reducing noise. Another beautiful feature I appreciate is anomaly detection. Once the data is collected, the system analyzes it for at least 14 days to set baselines, providing anomaly detections or alerts if anything deviates from the baseline. This is useful because the alerts are not static and help me work proactively rather than reactively. Third-party solution integration is another feature, allowing integration with any third-party solution, supported by REST API integration if no connector is available. Additionally, Helix GPT is a standout feature that adds meaningful content and context to situations, providing situation summaries and helping to run automations from the situations page. I can also ask Helix GPT about situations for post-mortem analysis, and it even integrates log insights for additional context. Helix GPT also assists in remediation by providing steps and code templates.

Whenever working in operations, there is always a lot of flow, and it is always demanding with many events. I recall working closely with one application team who had all their systems monitored in BHOM. During an outage, most of their applications stopped performing, generating a flood of alerts. However, AIOps correlated all these alerts into one single alert, creating a situation that included all related events and then identified the root cause of the catastrophic failure, which was linked to the disk's IOPS. This issue was significant for them but not easily identified, yet AIOps was able to pinpoint this problem.

One area where BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps can improve is by integrating APM data. BMC Helix is already working on this feature called the OpenTelemetry collector, which collects traces, metrics, and logs from applications and other APM solutions.

Documentation needs some improvement, as I have often wasted a lot of time due to incorrect information in the documentation.

I have been using BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps for approximately four years.

BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is very reliable if the foundation data, specifically the CMDB and discovery, is good. If the data is not good, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps may be unreliable, so it is crucial to ensure that foundation data is synchronized before implementing BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps.

BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is highly scalable as it operates in a Kubernetes environment, allowing it to be scaled in the same manner as any other Kubernetes application.

Customer support is amazing. I can easily reach out by logging a case in the case portal, and depending on the severity I select, I will be contacted by one of their support engineers. I would rate the customer support an 8.

I evaluated Dynatrace before choosing BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, but found it had many features I may never use, and it was quite expensive. Other infrastructure monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow ITOM were unreliable and not on par with BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps. I also tried MS SCOM, but it did not match up to BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps standards. BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is superior because it synchronizes service management and operations management, sharing data effectively between BHOM and ITSM.

I have been able to reduce approximately 80% of noise.

My advice for those looking to use BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is to ensure that all prerequisites for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps are in place before implementation to avoid false positives and misattribution to the solution. It is essential to have foundation data, CMDB, and discovery in place and functioning correctly. Ensure the processes in the organization follow ITIL standards and decide on the monitoring strategy to avoid discrepancies before starting to implement BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps.

BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is highly secure, as it uses API keys and access keys in encrypted form, allowing only one copy and no plain passwords anywhere, not even in agents. It is encouraged to integrate with LDAP for secure user access. I have given this product an overall rating of 8.5.

I primarily work on BMC Control-M, and I have exposures on BMC Helix and their monitoring as well, specifically Helix monitoring. I have been dealing with Helix Monitor primarily since the time it was TrueSight Operations Manager, even before it was branded as Helix monitoring.

One of the capabilities in BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is the AutoOps capability with integration with BMC Atrium Orchestrator, which allows for auto-healing capabilities that could be built, and that has been one of the features which has been interesting.

The analytics feature has helped identify issues proactively through log pattern detections, which has been quite helpful in terms of setting up alerting and notifications by proactively detecting a failure well ahead of time.

It not only impacts downtime from a downtime perspective but also from an MTTR perspective, as it has had a significant achievement and eliminated a lot of toil in the team. I have set up a lot of playbooks that helped automate the remediations and then proactively detect and address them automatically, healing the issues and proactively checking for further next occurrences.

I assess BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps's capability to provide a unified view across hybrid environments as quite adequate.

The product can be improved by providing more visualizations and prospective improvements from data visualizations and metrics capturing. Additionally, the amount of time it takes or the lag between alert detection to alert notification can be improved, as increasing the polling interval causes a load on the system, indicating multiple areas where the product can be architecturally improved.

I would like to see log aggregation built in for the ML analytics capability to be furthermore accurate, along with improved visualizations, insights, and interactive dashboarding.

I have utilized AIOps for incident management.

I would rate technical support overall as a seven. Response time, as per BMC's service notifications or service commitment, is something they handle well within their service offering timelines, meaning they are within their time limits; however, ideally, the technical support people's capabilities might need more improvement.

I am familiar with their competitors, specifically ITRS Geneos and Elastic. They are custom blendable with a suite of products and the systems that we have, and are very much customizable to meet our needs. In contrast, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is quite rigid, and we have to work around the system to make the two systems talk, meaning customizations are limited.

I'm still working with BMC products. I have been a technical consultant rather than using it myself as a reseller. I have not in-depth used the machine learning from BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps itself, but I have something in-house customized and custom-built that I have been leveraging so far.

I find automation functionalities very useful. I find the pricing on the higher scale. I would generally recommend the product for major banking organizations, trading, and financial organizations.

That is on the cards, as to whether I am going to stay with the product or switch in the future. The main factor is the pricing and the value that I draw down from a heavy investment. I am considering not just one single product, but looking at multiple different suites of products considering the modernization and containerization for the future. My overall review rating for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is seven.