BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

Our company uses the solution as an inventory tool for customers. The solution discovers your infrastructure and lets you know what servers and network devices are on it. It gives you details about applications, hardware, and software such as how they are connected and the dependencies between them. 

The solution is very stable and powerful.

The inventory management is very valuable. 

The solution is very fast and an entire discovery can be done within 15 to 20 days. 

Our company uses the solution to manage flows, automations, and mapping. 

The solution does not really meet our needs so our usage has dropped to 20% to 30% across ten users.

The solution is definitely useful.

We use the solution for IT Service and Operations Management providing benefits to Enterprise Service Management.

BMC Helix Discovery provides all-inclusive infrastructure discovery providing the visibility what you've deployed within your environment no matter on-premise or cloud.

We need to discover anything in the network and ensure that the discovered data is moved into the CMDB for asset management.

The best part is that whenever there is an outpost or any particular network, it can identify servers, routers, switches, etc. It immediately understands which component it is, and it provides the exact API details with all the components.

Discovery module is the foundation for the Helix platform. Because when you sell ITSM, the first step in the project is to install Discovery. When you install the storage, you discover all the infrastructure, assets, components, and service dependencies. With that, you start to populate the configuration management database, the CMDB. 

When you populate the CMDB with the information you get from Discovery, you have very intelligent and updated information in your CMDB. After that, you proceed to the service catalog, and then you start setting up your workflows and automating the workflows that manage the IT services. 

BMC is a great company because it has transformed the ITSM concept into the ESM concept, enterprise service management. The primary goal is to manage all lines of business. You don't just use ITSM to manage IT services; you also use HR, legal, sales, or any line of business. You can create workflows on the BMC Helix platform to manage any service. 

Discovery module gives the foundation of all this and provides a lot of information. It maintains that information because Helix periodically rediscovers the environment and updates the CMDB and everything integrated with the BMC Helix platform.

I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between services, it learns how it works. So, it learns to predict when a problem is going to happen. It becomes predictive in an autonomous way. 

You don't need a human to do that, and it helps the IT team go to the root cause of the problem. That reduces noise about the exam. Like, when a portal or a system goes down, you have a storm of incidents. 

Everybody opens an incident because they can't access the portal. It's not working, or they access it, and they can't input data into the portal or something like that. So when you have the AIOps — the artificial intelligence and machine learning — you aggregate all these incidents and use information from other solutions like a CMDB, Helix, nonuse, Dynatrace, or Apache Log. It makes the relationship between all this data and helps you go to the root cause of the problem really fast. 

So, AIOps is the most important feature of the BMC Helix platform because it helps a lot. It combines IT operations with business operations. Today, in most enterprises, we have siloed areas.

Business is siloed, and what they're doing in IT is isolated here. But when you deliver the BMC Helix platform to an enterprise, you help them break these silos and integrate all areas. The visibility that the platform gives is for all areas, not just for IT. So, in the portal, you have a collaboration, like social media collaboration, and you have a chatbot, an automated chatbot, and an intelligent chatbot, which helps you understand the problems you encounter. 

And the communication between the areas becomes better. And this is all possible because of the AIOps in the solution.

With BMC Helix Discovery, you can generate organizational maps and conduct discovery of your data center from hybrid environments. This allows you to discover any assets within your company's premises, including those within specified ID ranges. Furthermore, BMC Helix Discovery provides dependent maps and assists in topology visualization, enabling correlation with virtual IDs.

The ability to use it with or without agents is beneficial, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers.

The tool's accuracy of the results we receive looks promising in general. Its values are more than 95 percent accurate compared to other clients or different tools. I would say that Discovery offers a valuable mechanism to discover information.

The new features of the blueprint open doors for platform teams within organizations. In manufacturing or service industries, specific platform levels of networks are available, and the product simplifies finding that information. Modeling is also easier.

Apart from these, there are many other features, but the most promising factor is user-friendliness. It's straightforward: scan it, and you'll get the result. Another important aspect is security. BMC Helix Discovery's visualization may not be available in other tools. Compliance metrics and results from Tenable and Splunk are promising, but they usually filter information. BMC Helix Discovery provides a holistic view, which is valuable.

I consider BMC Helix Discovery easy to learn, especially with proper training or one month of good mentorship.

The product falls short compared to storage discovery mechanisms offered by Tenable or ServiceNow ITOM. In the market, there are various applications available that provide different sets of features. Its drawback is that it doesn't give the database configuration customers need out of the box. Additionally, the classification of storage virtualization is relatively lacking. Therefore, there is room for improvement, particularly in the database areas.

BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive. All of BMC's products are intuitive and simple to look at from a look-and-feel perspective. They have tabs like "discover," which means to discover something, "managing," which means you can manage something. They are very intuitive. If you know the language, you understand what it does.
Another thing is that it is easy to implement because BMC is a virtual appliance you can use in your environment. It's not like you have to install an operating system. Instead, you must install the binaries or dependencies before installing the application. It's a complete package in one bundle as a virtual appliance. You don't have to provide a machine or libraries or install dependencies or verifications. The solution is agentless and non-intrusive.

It's very easy to use the solution if you are configuring a domain-based Windows environment. Still, if you want to discover some Linux-based environments, it's a little tricky. BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options.