In addition to monitoring solutions from BMC, most enterprises nowadays also use monitoring software from other vendors, open source, and even home-grown scripts scheduled by cron job. Having a group of NOC operators watching the GUIs of all monitoring software in a NASA-like environment is simply not efficient. What is worse is when you have to pay the license fee for each monitoring software to connect with the back-end ticketing system.
BPPM/BEM cell provides extremely flexible and robust API and adapters to integrate with just about any monitoring software out there. Whether you are running monitoring tools from other commercial vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, or you use open source tools like Nagios, it is fairly straight forward to integrate alerts from these tools into BPPM/BEM cell using either its OS API or SNMP adapter. If you use home-grown scripts, all you need to do is to add an API call at the end.
If your back-end ticketing system is Remedy, the out-of-box 2-way integration (IBRSD) between BPPM/BEM cell and Remedy is more efficient than Remedy gateways for other monitoring tools. It is fairly straight forward to configure two instances of IBRSD as active/active failover, so your chance of waking up at 3am to fight fire is very slim. Since the license of IBRSD is included in the price of BPPM/BEM, you instantly cut down the cost when you stop paying for the Remedy gateway license for other monitoring tools.
Other added benefits include reduced maintenance effort for other monitoring software, less customization in Remedy, consistent ticket information for all monitoring tools, and possible event correlation between events from different monitoring tools. You will also make your NOC team's job easier.
I understand that it is not always easy to convince people who work on other monitoring software to integrate into BPPM/BEM due to organizational silo and technical complexity. It is important to pick up the right candidate for the first BPPM/BEM integration. Once the ROI is obvious, people will become more supportive for BPPM/BEM integration. In addition, it is also important to set up a consistent framework for all integration since BMC does not provide a standard for integration. Once you have set up a consistent framework for one-way and two-way integration, your next integration will become much easier.
At one of my past clients, it took our BPPM/BEM team three months to work with the other team to finish our first integration because the integration project had the lowest priority with the other team. Once everyone saw how well the integration worked and how much license fee it saved, our second integration took only 4 weeks to finish. Subsequently our third integration took only three days to finish.
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