5 reasons why you need HCL HERO for your BigFix environment

5 reasons why you need HCL HERO for your BigFix environment

It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to HCL HERO, an intelligent HCL Software Solution:
HERO, a Healthcheck and Runbook Optimizer, enables BigFix Administrators to easily monitor the health of their servers and perform informed recovery actions with specialized Runbooks. HERO frees up administrator time, reduces manual labor, reduces downtime of servers and prevents compliance delay.

Everyday companies use BigFix to keep Windows, Mac and Linux endpoints continuously patched, secure and compliant with internal security and regulatory policies.

Your systems are safe thanks to BigFix.

At this point, however, a question arises:

Who helps you ensure that the BigFix environment is healthy, configured correctly, and performing well?

You may have created your own solution both to monitor the health of the BigFix environment and to recover it in case of problems.

Or perhaps you are using IT Monitoring software and have created monitors and runbooks specifically for your BigFix environment.

Wouldn’t you rather have something out of the box?
Imagine not having to maintain and customize specific homemade procedures.
Imagine saving time to spend on activities with greater added value.
Imagine having a solution that does all this.

Well you can stop imagining. An out of the box solution does exist!

HERO is a product specific solution that, leveraging Big Data and Machine Learning, helps to maintain your BigFix environment by bringing AIOps use cases to manage the implementation.

HERO effectively combines centralized application monitoring with Runbook automation, providing a solution dedicated to BigFix, that makes the BigFix infrastructure easy to control and hassle free.

Here are 5 reasons why you can’t do without HERO.

1. Detect & Understand Hidden Issues

HERO helps BigFix Administrator to detect and understand issues that might be hidden from your view. HERO helps to detect misconfiguration, performance or infrastructure problems on multiple environments in a single integrated view. BigFix Administrator has an immediate understanding of the situation and where an action is needed thanks to a clear and visually engaging dashboard overview. Any machine, environment and failing component can be reached in just one click from this first screen, for a quick evaluation and fix. An alerting system completes the solution allowing the BigFix Administrator to receive a customizable email and notification when something happens.

2. Perform root cause analysis

HERO helps BigFix Administrator to perform root-cause analysis. Collecting KPI history, HERO helps in determining when an issue has started and which of the components stopped working as expected. This is how HERO helps you finding out why the issue occurred.

3. Find a solution

HERO allows BigFix Administrator to perform recovery actions based on monitors status, using customizable runbooks when needed. For a quicker action, the system selects and proposes the most accurate runbooks following the type of error.
For example, if HERO detects a FillDB overload, it proposes runbooks to solve the issue by adapting FillDB configuration to the BigFix environment.
The runbook library can be extended to share your own runbooks, correlated with potential failing components.

4. Run the solution

The power of HERO is that it provides out-of-the-box procedures for solving the issues and executes the solution in the environment for you, seamlessly.

5. Prevent issues

HERO provides actual KPIs, such as active threads and number of connected endpoints, so that BigFix Administrators can monitor and analyze performance.
Leveraging Big Data and Machine Learning, HERO provides also trend estimation of KPIs to predict potential problems such as compliance delay, overload time.

If you want a solution specific for your BigFix environment that guides the product administrator through all issue resolution steps in one UI, HCL HERO is the best solution on the market.

HCL HERO for BigFix is coming soon.

To know more, or ask for a demo, do not hesitate to contact us. (HCLSolutionsSupport@hcl.com)

In the meantime, you can visit our Website, watch a Video or taste HERO through our Sandbox.

Michelle foto profilo
Michelle McGough
Michelle McGough is a Product Manager for BigFix. Michelle has specialized in Endpoint Management for over 20 years with an emphasis on cost savings and risk management through automation.

Ernesto foto profilo
Ernesto Carrabba
Ernesto Carrabba is the Product Manager both for HCL HERO and HCL Clara.
Ernesto is a very dynamic product manager with experience in building and launching IoT products, combined with a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and study researches on Augmented and Virtual Reality.

2 Likes

Just had a play with it and it looks great! Fantastic work, and hopefully I’ll get to use it for real someday soon.

Question though, will this be an automatic product addition like WebUI or will it be an extra that needs to be licensed?

2 Likes

Hi thanks for the question! HERO is a separate HCL Solution that has a BigFix integration, so yes it’s an add-on. If you’d like some more detail or if you want in on an upcoming demo please DM me - we’ll get you connected to the Product Manager. Cheers! -Michelle

1 Like

That’s great news!!
I am curious and wanted to understand will HCL Hero would able to monitor the below item, Also any free demo is available ?

  1. Performance monitoring of FillDB log file and find out when issue was occurred ?
  2. Will it has capability to track the BFI/SCA Import issue, When and Why it occurred ?
  3. ActionSite missmatch version compared to Relay ?
  4. Invalid signature issue which occurred while deploying any action ?
  5. Alert mechanism before any issue occur such as Filldb file size ?
  6. If any auto schedule report is not generated will it trigger any alert ?

Many more concern I have but any live Demo would be helpful to answers my concern.

Regards,
Manish Singh

Some of the use cases you listed above should be supported by Hero, if my memory helps.
I would suggest to get in touch with @Ernesto_Carrabba who is the Product Manager for Hero to go through a demo and/or get more insights.

Hi Manish,
Thanks for your questions.
I’m quite sure that points 3 and 5 are addressed by the solution out of the box.
However we have a pluggable monitors and runbooks architecture, so we would love enrich the solution with several other monitors and runbooks.
We are sure that this wonderful community can help us to do this so that we can address all your needs.
We would love to show you a Demo, feel free to contact me in private or just send me an email with your preferred schedules at ernesto.carrabba@hcl.com
Regards,
Ernesto

1 Like

Hi Ernesto,

when can we get a look at HERO? Also…can it be extended to check the health of other things…and maybe be an all in one replace for some monitoring solutions that we see out in the wild?

Best Regards,
Frank W. Hansen

1 Like

Hey @Ernesto_Carrabba & @mcjee, Any chance that HCL Hero plays nicely in a 100% AirGapped environment, possibly also one that consists of multiple separate BigFix instances?

Hi @Ernesto_Carrabba

Like BigFix, Is there any evaluation license available for HERO?? so we can download setup and install it on our real time environment.

we are eagerly waiting to see the features and functionality of HERO.

1 Like

Hi @play2win
Thanks for contacting us.
We have an Early Adoption Program for HERO for BigFix.
We would like to share with you the program details as well as an HERO demo if you want.
By joining the program you can get a free license for a limited amount of time.
Please share me your availability for the next week at ernesto.carrabba@hcl.com so we can schedule a meeting.
Regards,
Ernesto

1 Like

Hi @MDMike,
there are some some limitation that applies to HERO in AirGrapped environment but let’s try to understand exactly if it can work for you.
Anyway is possible work with to multiple separate BigFix instances.
Regards,
Ernesto

@Ernesto_Carrabba I’ll send you an email when I get a chance.

Thank you @Ernesto_Carrabba.
Soon i will send you an email.

Is this product still valid? The links to the demo and the video do not seem to work.

No, it was ditched unfortunately which is a shame because it had some really nice ideas for proactively monitoring the health of the BigFix platform and foreseeing upcoming failures. I recently posted an RFE to offer at least the KPIs for the same in different monitoring systems but not much traction so far.