By Dick Stark

Last Wednesday, RightStar presented a webinar, “Introduction to BMC Helix Monitor,” led by BMC’s Mike Bell.  Mike discussed BMC’s new SaaS based solution that combines broad monitoring and event management capabilities with a containerized microservices architecture.  What’s exciting is that the on-premise version known previously as TrueSight–the combination of ProactiveNet and Patrol, is now available in the cloud as Helix Monitor.  

I opened for Mike by discussing the movement in the ITSM space towards an ITSM platform that adds IT Operations Management (ITOM). At BMC this is called Data Service Operations Management or DSOM, and it includes both the BMC Helix ITSM (formerly Remedy) and BMC Helix Monitor. Given the attention paid to agility required by digital businesses, customers now expect an integrated solution. Three areas of strategic consideration we discussed were:

On-going transformation and innovation. Coincidently, Tesla suffered a network outage the same day as the webinar. This news spread over social media in just an hour.  Tesla’s stock dropped, some customers were locked out of their cars, Tesla’s website went down, and Tesla stores were unable to process orders. Although connectivity was soon restored, a Twitter commenter pointed out that Tesla’s network infrastructure was likely to blame.

I asked Mike if Tesla had Helix Monitor, could this have been prevented? Of course the answer depends on what caused the outage, but Helix Monitor does monitor the network and application infrastructure, looking for known and unknow events. For today’s digital business’ that require 100% uptime, integrated monitoring tools are essential.

Automation has the potential to provide a greater return on investment than any other IT investment. For example, proactive service resolution, a Helix Monitor basic function, creates incidents from events and efficiently routes tickets with the associated related causal configuration item to speed identification of root cause and reduce MTTR.

End User Experience and Productivity. The ability to improve customer satisfaction, both employee and external customers, has always been both an ITSM and ITOM objective. Helix Monitor acts as the “portal of portals,” or “monitor of monitors.” Its graphical visualization and drill down shows performance of all metrics related to an infrastructure. Configuration of monitoring, event management and alarm generation follows a policy-based approach that allows for a one-to many deployment model to streamline and simplify administration of the solution.

Mike Bell then concluded the webinar demoing several use cases.  Helix Monitor, when integrated with Helix ITSM can better deliver support for ongoing operations while facilitating digital and cloud transformation. This means the organization (think Tesla) can meet the demands of the business more effectively—no matter how quickly it grows and evolves.