BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

BMC Helix Discovery is used for discovery of the assets and configuration items so that you can populate the CMDB.

The applicability depends on the customer environment. Usually it is straightforward to apply the policies. BMC Helix Discovery is seamless and has many plugins available.

It is a good feature that they offer. I have heard about it, but I am not currently using it, though I know that they have that feature available.

BMC Helix Discovery provides a lot of information that can be obtained from discovery, including the relationship between the CIs and how many CIs are orphans. The analytics capabilities are strong.

The interface is quite old and can be outdated.

BMC Helix Discovery has been in use since 2013. I am aware that they moved to the cloud and changed the name, but the solution remains the same.

Customer service quality depends on the team that you reach. Sometimes it is quite responsive, particularly when you go higher up in the organization. However, at the first level, you can sometimes experience some issues.

The setup timeline depends on the customer's solution. The out-of-the-box setup takes approximately a couple of days. However, the discovery component can take a month because you need to have a connection on every single CI and need to verify that the doors are open.

Implementation requires four people.

BMC Helix Discovery can generate ROI, but it is not cheap. However, it does bring value. You should expect at least one year and a half for ROI.

The setup cost is on the expensive side.

I still work with Helix on ServiceNow. However, I am not as hands-on with the discovery today as I once was, so I am not comparing it with other ServiceNow systems, for example, other discovery systems. BMC Helix Discovery is a frictionless and botless application, which is a good point in its favor.

For the customer, I would recommend this solution. The overall review rating for this product is 8.5.

BMC Helix Discovery was used in the process of discovering data centers. I assisted with planning for migration projects by building out the move groups. I used the BMC Helix tool to discover all the assets and the connectivity between the assets. BMC Helix is an ITSM tool, and it is one of the few tools that will actually discover the server-to-server communications.

The best aspect of BMC Helix Discovery is its flexibility. You can perform scanning at any time, and it provides substantial data for extraction. If there is data it doesn't extract and you understand TPL, you can write your own patterns to pull the data out of it, making it very powerful from that standpoint.

The query language is somewhat challenging to learn as it uses a Berkeley database. However, it has an excellent query building tool, and they have recently released a new visually-based version, which is very beneficial. Extracting data is straightforward through writing queries, running them, and pulling reports. The scanning process and credential setup are also easily manageable. Overall, it is an excellent tool.

The query language is somewhat challenging to learn. It uses a Berkeley database, and the query language is not easy to master for performing complex queries.

I have used BMC Helix Discovery for multiple years.

I encountered stability issues with BMC Helix Discovery, but these were primarily in the early versions. There were several versions that had bugs or issues. However, BMC has always been very responsive, and most of these problems were resolved relatively quickly. In the past four to six years, I cannot recall encountering any bugs.

BMC Helix Discovery's support is relatively responsive, depending on the level of the ticket opened. When opening a severity one ticket, they respond within four to six hours, which is commendable.

Positive

The setup complexity of BMC Helix Discovery varies depending on the level of control. When implementing it as a project for other customers, coordination with their administrators was necessary to obtain all the credentials. Once all the correct data and firewall rules were properly configured, the setup process was relatively straightforward.

The system is based on a VMDK. They set up a virtual machine using VMware, and you provide the VMDK for installation. The initial configuration is done through the console, while subsequent operations are performed through the website interface.

I would rate BMC Helix Discovery at 8.5 out of 10. I don't have information about BMC Helix Discovery's pricing as it varies based on whether you're a partner or not.

We sell the product and implement it.

Our clients have it both on cloud and on-premises. It can be a combination of cloud types as some will be on AWS, some on GCP, and others will have their own private cloud, with hybrids where a client wants on-premises for data security while other parts of the platform are in the cloud.

What we're looking for and trying to move towards is autonomous operations so that AI is implemented to suggest resolutions and to quickly identify faults or repeated patterns with no human intervention.

It's really having access to the relevant elements, and so that, in conjunction with the CMDB, allows you to identify a fault quickly and easily, making it so issues can be quickly resolved.

The ability of BMC Helix Discovery to save time and money for customers is all about resolution times and first fixes, linking heavily to the CMDB and ensuring that you have good clean data.

Technical support from BMC is generally good.

Resolutiion time is what's bothering me, as it's not always easy to get to the correct person or the right technical level needed to resolve the issue.

I've been dealing with the product for about 10 years.

The solution is stable enough, as long as cloud availability is there, which is something around 99.97%.

I definitely believe that the solution is scalable.

I'd rate support from 1 to 10 as an eight.

Positive

It all depends on whether you're replacing a legacy system or going from on-premises to a cloud containerized system, as there is an amount of cleaning up of the data that needs to be done, but generally, I would say it's a standardized process and should be quite smooth.

Generally via a 3rd party system integrator.

That's always a million dollar question regarding whether the solution is affordable or quite expensive; if you talk to the vendor, the pricing's great, but end users are always looking for a better deal.

There are cost implications when considering if the solution is suitable for all customers, from small to enterprise, as we typically focus on specific types.

To a degree, I have dealt with some similar products to BMC Helix Discovery.

We're really in the ITSM space. 

I wouldn't say it requires improvement, but investment and willingness are needed. 

I rate BMC Helix Discovery 7.5 out of 10.

Positive

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.

The improvement I want to see is a reduction in duplicate records. In comparison with SCCM, SCCM does not have any duplicate records, which is a significant advantage. Discovery should adopt a similar approach to avoid duplicate entries.

I have been using Helix Discovery for almost ten years.

I would rate the stability around nine out of ten. I have never seen any stable version of Discovery or any other tool as stable as this.

I would rate the scalability around 8.5 out of ten. There are no major issues with scalability.

I would rate the customer service around seven out of ten. There is a need for improvement in the support side, especially in the response time, which needs to be quicker.

Neutral

The setup process is very simple right now, not as difficult as it was in previous versions.

I would rate the pricing around four out of ten. It is quite expensive.

In my opinion, the main competitor for Helix Discovery is SCCM from Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

Based on my experience and the projects I've worked on, I can confidently say that the tool's stability is highly reliable. There hasn't been a single day of outage throughout my four years of experience, including working with top companies like Walmart and leading industry-related firms with millions of records. However, I must acknowledge that it is not entirely bug-free like any software. In the past four years, I've encountered and reported seven bugs. 

My company has around 150-250 users. 

When it comes to the tool's initial installation and setup, whether it's easy or difficult depends on the person's background. For someone familiar with it, it's generally considered easy. However, for those who are unfamiliar, about 20 percent of the knowledge articles published by BMC are usually sufficient to get started. Overall, it's not overly difficult and is a one-time installation activity.

I would say that the tool is worth the investment. Compared to other tools in the market, it covers a significant portion of your needs, around 70-80 percent. Even for the remaining 20-30 percent, the tool offers customization options, which can further tailor it to your specific requirements.

Based on my experience, I would rate BMC Helix Discovery as nine out of ten overall. However, some areas could still be improved, which is why I've kept one point as a buffer.

We use the solution for data center like server and discovery system.

The important feature is information capability.

It is very complicated to use. It should be more user-friendly. Also, it should provide more dashboards.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for two years.

It is not stable. We are suffering from upgrades.

20,000 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

Support take time to respond but they solve the issue.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple.

The product pricing is high.

I rate the product’s pricing a ten out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

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.

An area that can be improved is the IoT.  I have a customer here in Brazil interested in using it to discover assets that are not technology assets, like in a factory where you have machines that you need to monitor. 

All these machines already have software that monitors them, but they don't have the artificial intelligence and machine learning that BMC has. So, it's like a marketing issue. It's like a segment of the market that can be more explored. 

We get some opportunities in that market here in Brazil, so I think it could improve. But they already have a module called Edge, Discovery Edge, which works with the IoT, but I think it can improve that.

I have been familiar with this product for five months now. It's a very good product. It's the best in its class because I don't know any other vendor that offers both a Discovery and a monitoring module like BMC. It's a big differential for BMC.

The initial setup is very simple. This one is different than Varonis because we're talking about a SaaS solution. And what we need is an outpost. We call it outpost, which will be a server on the customer infrastructure. Install Discovery, the module on this server. And then it's good to go and easy to install. 

And it starts to collect. It needs agentless software and doesn't need to install an agent on the other servers. 

It goes on and discovers all of your infrastructure. We have more than 40,000 signatures for software and 66,000 network devices that are already cataloged inside the solution. So it's, like, 20 years of discovery, that of knowledge that we have inside the BMC Helix Discovery. 

So it's really hard not to discover something when you use the module. The setup is really easy. It's not a difficult procedure to do.

It has a study (Forester study) that shows a 314% ROI. You get a lot of benefits: operational efficiency and reducing costs. And you have to invest a bunch of money to get the BMC Discovery. 

If you know how to work with it, if you get a consultant that really knows and has experience, you'd probably reduce a bunch of costs that you incur today because you can use the Discovery module we have that's called continuous optimization, which shows you where you're spending more money. It shows you a lot like you're using too much memory for that infrastructure. You don't need that amount of memory. You don't need that amount of disk space; you don't need that advanced processor. 

So, by the end of the day, you're going to reduce something. I don't believe that reduction will be real fast. But the documents say that there is ROI. 

It's not a cheap product. When you get the ITSM, you get a specific bundle of licensing: Discovery, optimization, AI, and everything. Moreover, the benefit it delivers is that it's a fair price. Most of the enterprises here in Brazil, in the public sector and the private sector, will say it's an expensive product. 

And since I've been an IT manager for about 25 years, I would die to have BMC Helix Discovery in my infrastructure if I were an IT manager today because it's something that gives you all the visibility you need to make decisions to reduce costs. 

And it has a feature in Discovery where you can press a button and say, "I'm gonna make this change in the infrastructure."

"So, oh, you want it simulated?"

"Yeah. I will simulate it. You press that button, and it will show what will happen when you make the change to the infrastructure. 

And it shows, 'oh, you're gonna have an impact here, you're gonna have a problem there.' So it's a very intelligent solution."

So, that intelligence can't be cheap. That'll be expensive, but I don't think it's expensive. Therefore, the pricing is fair.

Let's take another instance. For example, you need to migrate this to the cloud. Do you want to migrate something to some cloud? You have an on-premise infrastructure and want to migrate to the cloud. You have a button on the solution that will tell you how much it costs to migrate to Azure, AWS, or Google. 

Of course, you're going to have to include the contract values. It's not that intelligent, but you can input your contract values if you have those values on hand. You already have a contract with AWS and you want to migrate some of your infrastructure there, and it'll show you how much it will cost, just with the press of a button. 

It's a fair price for me, but the projects are big. The budget for the project has to be adequate. You have to have a budget allocated to do it. If you don't, you won't be able to deliver that solution or you won't be able to buy it, you won't be able to deliver the specialists today that here in Brazil, we don't have too many specialists on BMC. That's a difficulty we have here today. 

Finding workers that have knowledge of the solution is not easy. You have to have many professionals here to get that knowledge. So we're getting stable, we're growing, and I hope Cloud One IT gets a foothold in the market.

There's nothing like it in the market. Not that I know. I have about 25 years of experience managing IT. I've never seen anything like it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is mainly used to discover the assets in the organization. A new concept called blind spots in BMC Helix Discovery seems to give more insight into which assets were missed. It helps VM managers or data center managers get a good picture of what assets are there and which VMs were deployed but not even touched.

The solution's most valuable feature is service modeling. BMC Helix Discovery already does almost 70% to 80% of the work, and only 20% is left for you to manually create relationships to complete the service model. It is critical for the business to define what services it needs.

BMC Helix Discovery is a bit tough to use and administer. It needs a lot of manpower to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

I am satisfied with the solution's reasonable technical support.

Positive

Setup-wise, the solution has recently improved a lot compared to the previous version. If you have the servers ready, the solution can be deployed within a few hours. The problem is with the connectivity. You need to get your connectivity sorted out from your organization, which takes a long time.

It takes at least more than a month to arrange the connectivity. Once you have the connectivity, the deployment can be done in a few hours.

Because of the solution’s automation, it saves up to 80% of the time for the administrator. The solution can save costs for the customer because they can reduce spending on other tools.

I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors.

The solution can be easily integrated with BMC Suite. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

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.

I've been using BMC Helix Discovery for two years. One of my projects included implementing a solution for one of the largest banks in my country.

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. It is a stable virtual appliance. The stability is based on a pre-hardened virtual appliance. It is not possible to break into the system, nor is it possible to have some virus intruding into the virtual appliance. The solution is pre-hardened by experts and based on Linux, not a Windows server. Linux is less likely to get infected with a virus. The solution is robust and stable.

I rate the solution's scalability a five or six out of ten. When you install the virtual appliance, you don't know how much faster you need to run the scan. If you have to rerun the scan often, you cannot scale it as much unless you have a lot of storage. You need a lot of housekeeping activity. But if you run scans five to six days or weekly, that would be okay.

Technical support is good. I didn't, you know, I didn't interact with support people for BMC Helix Discovery, but I have opened up cases with them for other products.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten because it doesn't take much time. You just have to start the machine, which will take some configuration settings. The machine will take about one and a half hours to start. The environment is ready, and you can have a POC in any environment within three to four days, and in that time, you can discover 5,000 to 6,000 devices too.

It hardly takes a week to deploy the solution. The installation takes no time, while the configuration takes some time. Most of the time is spent Interacting with stakeholders involved to get permission to scan all the devices and equipment in the data center. You might get some pushback from stakeholders. But overall, it will take about more than a week to configure it, you know, have the results.

It won't take more than two people to deploy the solution. Sometimes, I deploy the solution myself.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All BMC products are expensive.

There are open-source solutions available. ManageEngine is one option, but its look and feel and dependency mapping are not as good as Discovery and are not as intuitive.

You can discover Windows devices and servers easily using BMC Helix Discovery. The solution is designed by default for server Discovery and not desktop discovery. But you can use that as well as data center discovery. Data center discovery means you can discover server assets in your data centers, while desktops mean end-user devices. BMC is designed for servers in a heterogeneous environment, where you can discover Linux, EAX, Windows, you name it.

BMC Helix Discovery is an agentless tool. Nothing needs to be deployed on the system. The solution is non-intrusive and won't disturb anything on your servers. It will only read files and won't write anything. You need to convince stakeholders about this, and it will take some time to convince them that it's okay that you'll have a kind of privileged access to read files.

The solution is based on a pre-hardened Linux virtual appliance, which means you cannot use many Linux features. You can only have root access to many certain things, and it's not easy to get into it.

Discovery is a tool that is not for just one person. When acquiring BMC, you should take on board all the stakeholders of your IT state or your data center so they can utilize the product to its fullest. You should know what resources are utilized and how they are utilized. BMC Discovery gives you perspective on what applications are running on your servers, the storage capacity, whether your application is installed, and which operating system it is. Discovery will also tell you the operating system's end-of-life end of support so that you know everything in your IT state/data center.

I rate BMC Helix Discovery a ten out of ten.