Leveraging the power of AIOps, IT Operations elevates to a strategic digital businessdriver through the fast, cost-effective management of multi-cloud and on-premisesInfrastructure and digital experiences.

In the era of digital transformation, IT Operations’ role has changed from technology provider to digital enabler and is more critical than ever. However, cloud adoption, DevOps methodology, and the pace of innovation and change are creating unprecedent-ed complexity and challenging IT Operations’ ability to support business needs for speed, agility, and innovation.

The traditional approach to the discipline of IT Oper-ations must evolve in support of digital business by implementing artificial intelligence for IT Operations, or “AIOps.”

What is AIOps?AIOps is a new methodology that:1. Brings together diverse historical and real-time data from monitoring, the service desk, digital expe-riences, and devices in a big data platform.2. Uses machine learning and advanced analytics to proactively identify and react to data patterns indica-tive of systemic, actual, or potenial issues.3. Measures the impact of activity across increasingly complex and distributed digital business infrastruc-ture and applications.

AIOps empowers IT Operations to support innovation and the digital enterpriseTo effectively manage performance against digitalbusiness goals and control the cost of multi-cloudinfrastructure in alignment with budget constraints,core IT organizations need an AIOps platform. AIOpsplatforms differ from IT Operations Analytics (ITOA)in that they do real-time, dynamic patternidentification on the vast amounts of data createdby innovation-enabling technologies like bursting

microservices and hybrid IT infrastructure, withoutthe need for human intervention. Additionally, AIOps platforms are unique in their ability to orga-nize and analyze according to data sources that traditional processes, driven by functional silos, are unable to understand.

BMC TrueSight, an AIOps platform that elevates IT OperationsBMC TrueSight is an AIOps platform powered by machine learning and analytics that elevates IT Operations to address multi-cloud complexity and empower the speed of digital transformation. The analytics engine dynamically identifies patterns in digital data that are unrecognizable using rules-based event management. TrueSight analyzesin real-time on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and service desk information, and automatically applies analytics to: 1. Predict future performance issues with dynamic baselining and anomaly detection; 2. Forecast resource utilization, including public cloud cost, with capacity analytics; 3. Focus on the most likely source of a problem with probable cause analytics; 4. Discover issues captured in logs of a problem with log analytics; 5. Identify problems driving incidents with natural language clustering.

For more information about BMC TrueSight, please visit www.rightstar.com.

This article was adapted from BMC’s eBook “AIOps: Elevate IT Operations in the Digital Era.” For a copy of the eBook, email valerie.wilson@rightstar.com.

Leveragingthe Power

of AIOps

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Buyer’s Guide toBMC Remedyforce

Built on a Scalable, Secure, and StableCloud PlatformRemedyforce is built on the Salesforce platform, an extensible SaaS platform that allows multi-tenant add-on applications to be integrated into the main Salesforce application. IT can extend the value of the Salesforce platform by consolidating service desksacross the organization into a customer-centric ser-vice hub across IT, HR, facilities and maintenance, and legal, as well as IT functions such as IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Project Portfolio Manage-ment (PPM). This hub lowers costs by leveraging the same platform and administrative resources to serve multiple functions in the organization.

Enables Comprehensive, Easy-to-Implement ITSM functionalityRemedyforce provides comprehensive, out-of-the-box ITIL® functionality through a simplified, integrated service management platform that reduces cost and complexity. A single solution enables consistent ITSM processes throughout the organization.

With Smart Views, IT can easily visualize where a re-cord lives within its ecosystem and access all related records, tasks, change requests, configuration items, notes, and attachments in one view.

Delivers Fast Time to ValueRemedyforce accelerates ROI to reduce the cost and friction of digital transformation while delivering enterprise-level ITSM capabilities. An optimized, agile onboarding process reduces onboarding time by up to 75 percent, making it possible to realize value in 45 days or less. With no software or hardware to install or manage, and easy configuration rather than cus-tomized coding, IT can deploy the solution quickly to begin driving value.

Provides Insight and Visibility Through Dashboards, Reporting, and AnalyticsRemedyforce offers intuitive dashboards and report-ing that enable measurement and optimization of the effectiveness and efficiency of service management processes. Reports can be scheduled with distribution to pre-defined recipients.

Offers a Modern Social and Mobile User Experience Remedyforce enables IT to deliver modern user expe-riences through social, mobile, and live chat channels. Users can solve incidents, submit approvals, crowd-source information, and connect with each other through a variety of collaborative capabilities. An intuitive self-service portal lets users submit service requests or resolve their needs and issues by search-ing for solutions in a knowledge base or viewing the status of previously submitted incidents.

Enables Task AutomationRemedyforce automates common IT tasks to maxi-mize agent productivity, reduce manual effort, and improve the speed and consistency of issue resolu-tion. These tasks include the resolution of repetitive tickets, automated routing and assignment ofincidents, new hire onboarding, and employee relo-cation. Automatic routing of approval requests can be set up quickly and easily using out-of-the-box work-flow options.

And more!Integrated Asset Lifecycle Management, new releases at no additional cost, and simple “pay as you grow” pricing makes Remedyforce the ideal service desk for the midmarket organization.

To explore BMCRemedyforce go to http://www.rightstar.com/products/bmc-products/bmc-remedy-force-service-desk/

Why choose BMC Remedyforce Service Desk?

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Streamlining YourApproach to Change

Management

Every IT team faces the challenge of managing a constantly changing IT infrastructure, whether it’s rolling out new technologies, managing existing ones, or keeping up with a never-ending churn of updates and upgrades. The rate of change is also increasing as we accelerate into a “services first” world, and on top of that, demanding regulations require IT teams to provide a detailed audit history of system changes. To manage change successfully, IT teams need a repeatable, streamlined processthat captures the appropriate data and meets reg-ulations. Change management is used to manage these changes and to help to improve the availabil-ity of IT services, especially the services that are critical to the business.

Change management is often a heavy process that requires days of lead time, is plagued by a lack of information sharing between IT and development (especially when it’s difficult for the development team to capture changes) and the approval process is often complex, which slows down the process. The Atlassian approach to change managementprovides a path toward lean change management, which can meet the pace of your IT team while en-forcing your change policy.Jump on board and join hundreds who are already using a multilingual Jira Service Desk to give great support to their global customers.

Having a streamlined approach is possible when an IT organization makes it easy for the process to get

started, uses collaborative peer reviews to speed up the approval process, integrates IT anddevelopment teams to improve coordination on infrastructure and software development life cycle, and moves critical documents (aka change plans) into Confluence. Many IT teams find it frustratingto raise a change request with the IT team respon-sible for managing that process. With Jira Service Desk, you can streamline the requestintake by using the customer portal to make it easy for IT teams to raise a change request.

You can also power your Jira tickets with a CMDB integration to extend automatic mapping of all con-textual information relevant to the fulfillment of the request. These data points may also account forthe time sensitivity of a change request, ensuring that the minimum standards on due-diligence are met for a healthy balance between speed and risk. Jira Service Desk and Riada Insight offer a powerfulsolution to map complex data sets and business rules right in the context of your change requests.

Once your change requests are mapped with all rel-evant data points, Jira workflow automation can be used to enable your processes and standards. For instance, the Jira workflow can dynamically pivotto facilitate one or multiple approvals, as required. Jira workflows automation can route and assign the request to the next authorized person in charge per your business rules, and can validate that only theauthorized person (or people) can provide approv-als for a specific change request.

This is an excerpt from the Atlassian Whitepaper “Tips to Make a Lean, Mean ITSM Machine.” For a copy of the Whitepaper, please email valerie.wilson@rightstar.com.

fire,” no new software is deployed or patched, customer sat is terrible, and Dev team 1 becomes a huge bottleneck. To make matters worse, sales slow and profits drop.

Round 2. Before diving into the second round the instructor and the students did a retrospective to look at what went wrong and figure out what to do next. It’s determined that better communication, (actually co-location of the two Dev teams), offers better work flow and utilization. The Test group actually starts testing software. The Service Desk pushes back on the Business group and asks for help to better prioritize the incidents. Ops looks at hiring a consultant to fix one of the breaks, and Dev builds a Kanban board to better prioritize and track work. By the end of the round, things have moved from total chaos to a more controlled cha-os, with improving sales and profitability.

Round 3. Now things are starting to really im-prove. The Dev Team posts more information on the Kanban board, resources are shared and not siloed, and automated testing happens. Everyone works together to clear the backlog and software gets deployed. Ops starts implementing problem management (problem solving and study always trumps, “when in doubt, reboot). This reduces the number of incidents. The best news: all teams be-gin operating under a process framework which allows for continuous integration, or “shift left,” to ensure even more rapid and accurate product development success. Naturally, sales improve and profits rise.

Getting Dev and Ops under the same roof rein-forces shared goals, improves communication and can dramatically reduce the time to get help or needed information.

Visit Dick Stark’s blog at http://dick1stark.com

Would You Rather Play a Game or Listen to a DevOps Lecture?

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What would you rather do, listen to a lecture on DevOps or play a game? The answer was obvious last week at RightStar’s half day DevOps simulation / gaming session in Washington, DC to a sold-out crowd of 25 attendees. This role based simulation is highly realistic and leverages game dynamics to pro-vide a vision of successful DevOps practices and the resultant business value. It was clear that the attend-ees enjoyed the session, left with a greater under-standing of how DevOps practices could benefit their organization, and most importantly, had fun.

Like in the book the Phoenix Project, the attendees are part of a fic-tional retail company that must rely heavily on IT and ecom-merce for marketing and sales success. Also, during the session, and like the Phoenix Project, nearly every IT calamity possi-ble befalls the company, which drastically impacts its on-line sales and causes the company to lose money. Time to put DevOps to work!

Round 1. The attendees are divided up into six groups: Service Desk, Business, Dev Team 1, DevTeam 2, Testing, and Operations. In addition to keeping the “lights running,” the teams must develop new applications and continue to improve existing ones. But after a few IT glitches, things quickly go from bad to worse. It’s total chaos: Ops’ “hair is on

by Dick Stark, President & CEO, RightStar Systems

What’s New in BMC Remedyforce Winter ‘18?by Anne Brock, RightStar

Would You Rather Play a Game or Listen to a DevOps Lecture?

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So, someone who just wanted to browse SAP knowledge articles could do that. If this wasn’t your “ask”, I hope you still like it!

4. Support for files object to upload attachmentHave you been feeling a bit limited with your at-tachments? You can now use Salesforce Files to at-tach files up to 2 GB in size! Ok, let’s not encourage files that large, but at least the prior limits no longer apply if you move to the Salesforce Files object.

5. Mass edits of CMDB recordsWhoops, almost forgot to mention – remember that very cool list view of the CMDB we’ve had lately? Where I can look at records like they are almost an excel spreadsheet? Now, with Winter 2018, you can mass update those records! If you need to set a group of records to a new location or some other mass update, you can do in the CMDB console.

6. And finally – integration with BMC DiscoveryIf you are using BMC Discovery (aka ADDM), there is now an integration with Remedyforce that doesn’t require Pentaho Kettle; and the integration brings over many more classes and relationships. If you aren’t using BMC Discovery – it’s worth looking into! With “Start Anywhere Modeling”, it’s easy to map assets and relationships in your data center so you get a full picture of the impact of any changes.

All of the new features are documented here - https://docs.bmc.com/docs/remedyforce/201801/en/20-18-01-enhancements-783055502.html

To explore BMC Remedyforce, go to http://www.rightstar.com/products/bmc-products/bmc-remedy-force-service-desk/

Remedyforce Winter 2018 is here – and it’s better than ever! There are been some great additions to it. As always, I’ll highlight my favorites here; dive into docs for the full list.

1. Multiple layout types for profilesWhat a dry phrase for something so awesome! As you may or may not know, you’ve been able to assign different ticket layouts to different profiles for a long time. This means an HR profile person will see HR fields, while a Communications person will see Communications fields. Well, Winter 2018 has taken this to a new level! You can now allow profiles to access multiple layouts – so if I’m working on a ticket that I think is an IT ticket, but then I realize it is a facilities ticket, I can switch layouts and have facil-ities fields available. And even better – you can now assign categories and templates to the different lay-outs; no more sharing rules. The Communications team will see their categories on the Communica-tions layout; HR will see HR categories. Slice and dice them any way you want, it’s all amazing. Right now, the layouts apply to Incidents and Tasks, not to Service Requests, Changes, Problems or Releases.

2. Clients can update their own profiles on self-serviceIf the administrator allows it, users can update their profile information on Self-Service. For those of you that don’t import in the information, it’s a great way to ease your administrator’s burden.

3. Knowledgebase articles shown by categoryI know one of my customers asked for this. Was it you? The ask was to be able to show knowledge-base articles by category on self-service.

Atlassian in Action:Incident Management

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Here’s how Atlassian helps you take a more compre-hensive, agile, and collaborative approach to inci-dent management, across the entire lifecycle:

1. Identifying the incidentWith Jira Service Desk, it’s possible you already knew about the incident even before the first em-ployee submitted their ticket. How? Your hardware, monitoring systems, and services can easily send their alerts directly into Jira Service Desk via open REST APIs. Quite a few vendors have already built out these integrations, and it’s easy for you to create your own.

As system alerts come in, Jira Service Desk’s built-in automation can help you properly categorize each incident, classify it as low or high priority, andeven take over repetitive tasks like ticket routing, adding important comments to a ticket, notifying teams about issues that are about to breach SLAs and more. New automation rules are easy to set up via the user interface, with no scripting required. At the same time, Jira Service Desk automatically searches Confluence for knowledge base articles, runbooks and troubleshooting guides that might be associated with the incident - and pulls the top recommendations directly into the incident. As a result, your agents aren’t blindsided. They often know about outages and disruptions long before they are reported, and with the right information already in hand, are hard at work on restoring the service.

2. CommunicatingIf this outage is impacting external customers, you

want to let them know right away, and Statuspage lets you totally automate incident communication. You can integrate it directly with your monitoring and alerting tools, so customers stay informed of inci-dents, downtime, or even scheduled maintenance in real-time. And your status page is hosted outside your infrastructure with built-in redundancy soyour page is up even if your service is down.You can create a custom status page in minutes that customers can subscribe to to receive status up-dates via e-mail, SMS, or webhook. Users can sub-scribe to all updates or choose individual pieces of your service they want to stay up-to-date on. You can even create incident templates so you don’t have to waste valuable time during an incident coming up with the right words to say to your users. And private pages mean you can also provide your employees with a single source of truth for internal service sta-tus. Private pages feature authenticationvia IP restrictions, SAML 2.0 (and related vendors such as Okta, PingIdenity, and OneLogin), as well as Google Auth.

In fact, using Statuspage to communicate with cus-tomers and employees doesn’t just increase trans-parency and build trust, it can reduce ticket volume too. By integrating Statuspage with Jira Service Desk, you can display incidents directly on your Jira Service Desk portal to reduce the surge of duplicate tickets at the source by as much as 30%.

3. InvestigatingIncidents are often measured by the time that elaps-es from when they first occur to when they are resolved and closed, called Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). During most incidents, as much as 70% of the MTTR is spent in the investigation phase,

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

The following article is excerpted from the eBook, “Building a Legendary Service Desk.”

Atlassian in Action:Incident Management

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trying to identify what actually happened.

Why? Because communication is difficult, and agents don’t have the right information at hand. Emails and phone calls are notoriously terrible ways to collabo-rate quickly.

To start, Jira Service Desk gives your agents clear priorities, and a more context-rich place to collabo-rate. The most urgent issues are sorted to the top of the queue, and agents can bring each other into the discussion easily with @mentions. In this example, a service desk agent might @mention a database engineer and a change manager, who can see then see the full history of the incident and help swarm around the issue.

Embracing ChatOps takes it to the next level, though. In Jira Service Desk, a single click launches a Hipchat room dedicated to an incident, pulling in all the critical alerts, context, and even team mem-bers you need to swarm even faster. And if other teams mention your incident anywhere across your entire Hipchat ecosystem, you get notified, so you can discuss or work on your incident across the company in real time.

Finally, you can even link incidents in Jira Service Desk to other issues, change requests, bug reports, and even software projects in Jira Software, so you can track the status of potential dependencies and even alert other teams when you believe your inci-dents may be related.

4. Resolution and RecoveryTaking a collective approach to incident resolution like we’ve outlined above can reduce the MTTR for major incidents by up to 40%, in our experience.But the work doesn’t end just because you found and resolved an incident faster. Using Confluence to document the resolution and capture the critical

insights you learned along the way should be a standard part of your Post Incident Review (PIR)process. You can even designate the actions you want to take as a result of what you’ve learned — like assigning knowledge base articles, or reporting soft-ware bugs to the development team.

Afterall, closing an incident doesn’t always mean the underlying problems have been resolved. Jira Service Desk lets you create Automation Rules to keep linkedissues in sync. So if your outage is caused by a soft-ware failure, for example, you would link the incident to a corresponding issue in the software team’s backlog. Then, an Automation Rule could keep you notified (and even update your incident) once the underlying software issue has been resolved.

To request a copy of the eBook, email valerie.wilson@rightstar.com.