BMC Remedy ITSM – Cisco ACI joint solution delivers robust and agile IT operations

Introduction

As companies strive to become digital enterprises, they need to make the best use of their existing assets and infrastructure, while introducing new technology and tools that drive the business forward. ITSM is one of the key digital accelerators that deliver improved performance, higher availability, and reduced risk, all while optimizing IT costs. Modern IT operations have to function in a continuous dev-ops model, manage numerous tools, and make sense of all the noise in an environment that lack any decipherable data and analytics to deliver modern applications that have a complex web of interdependencies across a distributed environment.

At Cisco, we observed the growing customer interest in ITSM/ITOM space since the announcement of ACI and quickly forged relationships with leading ITSM vendors like ServiceNow, Cherwell and brought to market joint solutions to automate and streamline incident management, health monitoring use-cases while simultaneously building a growing pipeline of customer deployments.

Today, we are proud to add BMC Remedy solution for Cisco ACI to this significant ITSM technology partner ecosystem portfolio. This blog captures the essence of the solution and how it enables intuitive service management for the digital enterprise, on-premises or in the cloud.

Solution overview

BMC Remedy ITSM suite provides out of box ITIL service support functionality, from architecture to integration and implementation to support. BMC Remedy ITSM has fast established itself as one of the market leaders addressing IT transparency, flexible and agile services, and effective collaboration and reporting, aided by a single, central shared data model. Cisco ACI, an SDN based networking architecture, enhances business agility, reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments.

Organizations are increasingly looking to cut costs and find ways to optimize their IT investments. Tight integration of the ITSM layers with underlying IT infrastructure helps organizations to not only optimize their IT infrastructure but also helps them to streamline day to day IT operations.

BMC Remedy ITSM solution for Cisco ACI is a fully-automated policy-based enterprise service management solution that provides single console visibility into your data center and delivers business-aware IT operations.

Cisco ACI’s open API seamlessly integrates with BMC Remedy’s REST API and forms the foundation for the integration. The key solution component is the BMC ITSM App for Cisco ACI.  The APIC facing interface of the App pulls necessary information from the APIC object database and passes it to BMC instance.

Figure: Architecture and Use Cases of BMC Remedy ITSM – ACI solution

Major use cases covered as part of the ACI-BMC Remedy joint solution include CMDB enrichment, health and fault monitoring, and proactive incident management. With these ACI-BMC ITSM solution use cases, customers get unprecedented automation, visibility, and efficiency in their IT service management.

The solution brings a lot of value to the customer, including:

Single console visibility: The solution keeps track of the entire ACI fabric and passes that information periodically to BMC Remedy CMDB thus providing an accurate and up to date picture of the underlying infrastructure. This in-depth visibility allows admins to make more informed decisions and manage the data center infrastructure efficiently.

Healthy Data Center: Faults and dip in health scores in the ACI fabric triggers automatic ticketing workflows in BMC Remedy and further provides admins with the all the relevant information needed for troubleshooting. With all the workflows happening in near real-time, IT teams can quickly identify the root-cause and remedial solutions leading to a drastically reduced MTTR.

Proactive Incident Management: With Cisco ACI keeping an up-to-date view of service-aware infrastructure and informing BMC Remedy ITSM suite about any disruptions and outages, IT operations teams respond more proactively to incidents. Further, the user can use BMC Remedy Problem management workflows and record recurring problems and associated solutions in the Known Error DB (KEDB) building a rich repository of past incidents and actions thus creating a proactive incident management system.

As customer adoption of ACI-BMC Remedy ITSM suite becomes widespread, we will continue to explore newer use-cases to address IT operational pain-points.