BMC Helix Observability & AIOps

1. The best thing about the service is the commitment that BMC gives as they render service to ensure we get the best usage out of the tool. 2. I like the AIOps cababilites. BMC seems to be a front runner when it comes to leveraging AI logic in their observability tool. Service Mapping gives the customer a broader view of the application landscape, helping us to indentify the root cause of our service outage. 3. The ease of integration with 3rd party tools for end-to-end insights has been a game changer. Our company tends to acquire companies on a regular basis. This was a challenge in the past, as we had to determine the best course of action to get these acquired companies integrated. With the introduction of intelligent integration from BMC, this has become as easy as providing authentication. Afterwards, the magic happens.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization has been a robust data warehousing application suite. It handles a huge volume of data. The licensing count task has been improved over the older TSCO methods.

1. The best feature is the dynamic results, that are achievable via the various source systems. 2. The ingestion systems, with some exceptions, are the most advanced in my experience. The progress on the data ingestion feom Discovery has been tremendous. 3. Broad and flexible automation options look very promising.

1. Reporting would be one of the things I dislike about the product. I think BMC can do a better job of out of the box reporting for simple reports like top talkers, inventory, etc. 2. License management. BMC tools do not do a good job of managing licenses. This makes it very hard for customers to budget as the contract comes up for renewal. We have no idea where we stand when it comes to overages. This makes it very difficult during contract renewal time. 3. Lack of SNMP management. Although SNMP is an old protocol, there are still several devices that can only be managed/monitored via SNMP. We have stressed to BMC to add SNMP to their intelligent integration platform. This will allow BMC to ingest SNMP trap data from SNMP managed devices.

The on-premises solution was not ready for our org's needs. The lengths of time for BMC to develop patches or workarounds in an on-prem setting. The lack of ease in finding info on the Knowledge Base and other documentation sites.

1. The exception referenced above is the intelligent integrations component. There are issues that give concern for larger data loaus and give pause when considering long term operational requirements. 2. RBAC for the product is challenging to implement given gaps between documented roles and actual real world permissions. 3. The discovery connector, although much improved, still has some limitations that are concerning. Progress thus far on this front indicates that improvements are heading in the right direction.