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BMC Helix Integration

MetricsHub pushes the collected metrics to BMC Helix Operations Management through the BMC Helix Exporter, which leverages the BMC Helix REST API.

Prerequisites​

Before integrating MetricsHub with BMC Helix:

  1. Install MetricsHub on one or more systems that can access the monitored resources over the network
  2. Configure the monitoring of your resources
  3. Create a dedicated authentication key for MetricsHub integration.

Configuring the integration​

Enabling BMC Helix Enrichment​

  1. Edit the MetricsHub configuration file (metricshub.yaml)

  2. Enable the bmchelix enrichment extension:

    enrichments:
    - bmchelix

Configuring the BMC Helix Exporter​

  1. Edit the otel/otel-config.yaml configuration file

  2. In the exporters section, configure the BMC Helix Exporter as follows:

    exporters:
      bmchelix/helix1:
        endpoint: https://company.onbmc.com
        api_key: API_KEY
        timeout: 20s

    where:

    • endpoint is the URL of your BMC Helix Portal (e.g., *.onbmc.com for SaaS tenants, or your on-premises Helix instance URL)
    • api_key is the API key used to authenticate the exporter. To obtain it, connect to BMC Helix, navigate to Administration > Repository and click Copy API Key
    • timeout is the number of seconds before a request times out (default = 10s).

  3. (Optional) Enable automatic retries in case of export failures by adding:

    retry_on_failure:
    enabled: true
    initial_interval: 5s
    max_interval: 1m
    max_elapsed_time: 8m

    Where

    • enabled activates the retry mechanism when set to true
    • initial_interval is the time to wait after the first failure before retrying. Ignored if enabled is false. Default: 5s.
    • max_interval is the maximum wait time between retry attempts. Ignored if enabled is false. Default: 30s.
    • max_elapsed_time is the maximum total time to attempt sending a batch. If set to 0, the retries are never stopped. Ignored if enabled is false. Set to 0 for unlimited retries. Default: 300s.

    For more details, refer to the Exporter Helper

  4. Declare the BMC Helix Exporter in the metrics pipeline as follows:

    service:
      extensions: [health_check, basicauth]
      pipelines:
        metrics:
          receivers: [otlp, prometheus/internal]
          processors: [memory_limiter, batch]
          exporters: [bmchelix/helix1]

  5. Restart the MetricsHub service to apply the changes.