HCL IntelliOps Event Management v1.1

The release notes capture the details of features and functionalities introduced in HCL IEM as part of its second release version 1.1.

Version 1.1 focuses on the important enhancements of the features along with addition of new features as well to improve the efficiency of the system.

What’s onboard?

Following are the enhancements/upgrades and features as part of HCL IEM v1.1:

• BigFix AEX integration to leverage Gen AI capabilities for Incident Triaging: Leveraging GenAI for Intelligent Insights to analyze and monitor incidents, providing more intelligent insights and improving MTTR. We are focusing on Enhanced User Experience as this feature would streamline incident resolution processes and improve overall user satisfaction.
• Multiple priority incident creation via IEM: Leveraging Dynamic Incident Prioritization by defining conditions to automatically assign appropriate incident priorities based on CI and IEM criticality. This shows improved ServiceNow Integration ensuring seamless integration with ServiceNow and provide a more user-friendly experience for selecting incident priorities.
• New role for ticket creation by SRE: Leveraging enhanced security and efficiency by creating a default role with restricted permissions for SREs, streamlining the ticket creation process and improving security.
• Self-Monitoring of Customer-side IMM GW component: Implementing a default correlation rule to monitor NiFi-IEM connectivity. By analyzing NiFi heartbeat events, the system automatically generates actionable alerts for connectivity disruptions, eliminating the need for manual rule creation and ensuring proactive issue detection. Upon connection restoration, the system automatically clears the generated alert.

• OOB NiFi Connectors Development and management via IMM (Integration Management Module) Portal: Added more single-click connectors for seamless integration with leading element monitoring solutions, ensuring a comprehensive data ingestion via NiFi in real-time. The table below shows the connectors being released in this release.

  S.No.	Event Connectors	Status
  1	Amazon CloudWatch - Pull	Completed
  2	Amazon CloudWatch - Push	Completed
  3	Apache Kafka HTTP	Completed
  4	Apache Kafka (SASL) - For Plain text authentication	Completed
  5	Apache Kafka (SSL)	Completed
  6	Microsoft Azure	Completed
  7	DX Spectrum	Completed
  8	Elasticsearch (ELK)	Completed
  9	Email-IMAP	Completed
  10	Email-POP3	Completed
  11	Fluentd	Completed
  12	GCP	Completed
  13	Generic Rest	Completed
  14	Generic Socket	Completed
  15	Generic Syslog	Completed
  16	Grafana	Completed
  17	Nagios	Completed
  18	Nimsoft	Completed
  19	OpenNMS	Completed
  20	RabbitMQ	Completed
  21	Science Logic	Completed
  22	SolarWinds SWO	Completed
  23	Splunk	Completed
  24	Sumo Logic	Completed
  25	DX Spectrum	Completed
  26	System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)	Completed

• Connector health check monitoring dashboard: The IMM Portal features a comprehensive dashboard for monitoring the health and performance of integrated connectors. Some Key metrics highlights include:

  • Latency: Tracks the time it takes to establish connections with third-party tools like Zabbix etc.
  • Response Time: Measures the time it takes for connectors to process data and respond to requests.
  • Load: Monitors the workload on connectors to identify potential bottlenecks or performance issues.

  This enhanced visibility empowers users to proactively address connector-related problems and optimize data ingestion efficiency.

• Correlation rules priority resequencing: Correlation rules priority resequencing can be done in case of reordering\deletion of existing rules via drag action.
• Re-submission of deleted entities with same Name/ID: Enabling users to recycle names and IDs of previously removed entities for new records. Hence, simplifying the process of managing entities.
• Event correlation rule default configuration enhancement: The system will initially monitor and analyse incoming events and alerts without creating incidents on Day 0 based on default correlation rules configuration. This allows for a baseline assessment of normal behaviour and helps filter out irrelevant noise.
• Group filtering option enhancement for events/alerts/actionable: Implemented enhanced Data Filtering by allowing users to filter events, alerts, and actionable based on custom fields added to entities. We are also providing options to sort data based on various fields like Source, Parameter, Ascending Time, etc.
• Maintenance window validation and upgrades: Implementing flexible Maintenance Window Configuration by allowing users to select multiple days of the week for maintenance windows. Along with that enforced validation of maintenance window configurations before submission.
• Topology view expansion: Maintaining an expanded topology view even when branching into CI components, providing a more comprehensive view of the IT environment.

HCL IntelliOps Event Management: Integration Management Module

HCL IEM Collector refers to effectively gathering data from diverse sources, providing a wide range of single click, custom integrations compliant with the industry standards for connectors and APIs. The events, data and performance connectors are developed in Apache NiFi. These OOB NiFi connectors can be leveraged for data ingestion managed by IMM (Integration Management Module) Portal. IMM is an integration gateway of IntelliOps Event Management which is used for 3rd party tools integration and ingesting event, performance, and configuration data into IntelliOps Event Management for performing event management functions.

Following are the limitations/restrictions with respect to the features and functionalities released as part of HCL IEM v1.1
Default data retention for user generated chat data is now 12 months.

• For each device/customer there will be 10 events per day ingested on SaaS platform and each data point size is considered as 2 KB.
• As per the fair usage policy 300 Event per Device per Month (Per Customer) is the capping.
• There is an assumption of 20 correlation rules per customer.
• Limited Use-case implementation in integration with BigFix AEX

HCL IEM is hosted on Google Cloud Platform and utilizes SaaS services. System Requirements are applicable only for
IMM, a gateway component of IntelliOps Event Management System.

• Prerequisites for IMM

  Prerequisites are specific condition that needs to be met before initiating the configuration. Hence, mentioned below are pre-requisites for IMM:

  • Supported OS for IMM
    • Linux RHEL 9.x
  • Supported Web Browsers
    • Microsoft Edge: Current or previous version
    • Mozilla Firefox: Current or previous version
    • Google Chrome: Current or previous version
    • Safari: Current or previous version

• Prerequisites for Apache NiFi

  Prerequisites are specific condition that needs to be met before initiating the configuration. Hence, mentioned below are pre-requisites for NiFi:

  • System Requirements for NiFi

    Apache NiFi requires compute and memory resources dependent upon the size and nature of the dataflow involved.  The data is stored on disk while NiFi is processing it. So NiFi needs to have sufficient disk space allocated for its various repositories, particularly the content repository, flowfile repository, and provenance repository. NiFi needs to be configured according to the following system requirements:

  • Supported OS for NIFI
    • Linux (Recommended) RHEL 9.x
  • Supported Web Browsers
    • Microsoft Edge: Current & (Current - 1)
    • Mozilla Firefox: Current & (Current - 1)
    • Google Chrome: Current & (Current - 1)
    • Safari: Current & (Current - 1)
  • Hardware Sizing Recommendation for NiFi and IMM

    • Following is the table for Hardware Sizing of NiFi and IMM: -

      Tool	Tool Component	Type	Count of VMs	Operating System	H/w Requirements	Database Requirement	Other Requirements
      NiFi			Minimum 3	RHEL9	8 core and 16 GB of RAM		Requires Java 8 or Java 11 Service Account nifiadmin
      IMM	Web	Non-HA	1	RHEL9.x	2CPU, 4GB, 50 GB Data Disk	NA
      IMM	DB	Non-HA	1	RHEL9.x	4CPU, 8GB, 250 GB Data Disk	Postgresql 15
      IMM	Web	HA	2	RHEL9.x	2CPU, 4GB, 50 GB Data Disk	NA	Load Balancer
      IMM	DB	HA	3	RHEL9.x	4CPU, 8GB, 250 GB Data Disk	Postgresql 15

      
       

      IEM Event Tier-Per Month	Sizing
      Up to 750000	Small
      Up to 3000000	Medium
      Up to 24000000	Large

  • Networking Requirement
    • 1 Gbps NIC card

  • Port Requirement for NiFi and IMM

    Following is the table for Port details of NiFi and IMM: -

    Port	Protocol	Direction	Source	Destination	Description	Application Name
    9443	TCP	Bi-directional	IMM	NiFi Servers	To open NiFi UI	NiFi
    10443	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    11443	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    6342	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    2181	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    2888	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    3888	TCP	Bi-directional	NiFi Servers	NiFi Servers	To run NiFi as a cluster	NiFi
    443	TCP	Bi-directional	End User	IMM Server	Web Application	IMM
    4100	TCP	Bi-directional	End User	IMM Server	Web API	IMM
    4300	TCP	Bi-directional	End User	IMM Server	Orchestrator Service	IMM
    5432	TCP	Bi-directional	IMM Server	IMM DB Server	Database	IMM

HCL IntelliOps Event Management can help an enterprise in its ambition to simplify and automate its IT Operations with the shortest time-to-value approach. With robust correlation and detection capabilities powered with the best in line AI algorithms and efficient integration management module, it minimizes human intervention with the goal of automating the process of automation itself, reducing implementation cycles to speed up ROI realizations and improve business outcomes. With our elaborate Event Management product, the operations team never misses critical or outage scenarios at the right time. This ensures availability of critical business services and infrastructure for an organization and learns from recurring scenarios to address common issues.

For any queries/clarifications, please reach out to Support