Architecture

Question: What are the recommended and maximum number of users that can be supported in Production, Development, and Non-Prod Environments?

Answer: There is no constraint on the number of users supported. As BigFix Service Management SaaS version is a cloud solution, infrastructure can be dynamically scaled up with the increased workload. The product is, however, currently live in a customer environment supporting 200K plus users with 10% user login concurrency.

For the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version, scalability depends on the customer’s infrastructure capacity. The platform is built to support large-scale enterprise deployments, and HCL’s professional services team assists in right-sizing the environment—whether for Production, Development, or Non-Production use cases—based on the expected user volume and concurrency requirements.

Question: How are application changes or upgrades performed, and how are they coordinated?

Answer: To deliver new and enhanced IT services, regular upgrades are introduced in the system. Bug fixes, enhancements, and new features are introduced in half-yearly releases which are documented in the release notes.

Question: How are new releases deployed?

Answer: For the SaaS version of BigFix Service Management, we follow DevOps best practices with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) through a fully automated pipeline. New releases and updates are deployed at regular intervals with minimal disruption to service.

For the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version, new releases are made available as packaged updates. HCL provides detailed deployment instructions, and our professional services team can assist with applying updates to ensure a smooth and controlled rollout, based on the customer’s change and maintenance schedules.

Question: What is your maintenance cycle for the patches?

Answer: Regular maintenance of the cloud platform is carried out as per the maintenance cycle proposed by the vendor. i.e., AWS Cloud and customer recommendations.

Question: Describe the flexibility provided by BigFix Service Management to modify/ extend the data model (i.e. column extensions, creation of new tables, the establishment of new foreign key relationships, etc.)

Answer: Changes in the data model would require development effort and can be brought about by the BigFix Service Management engineering team only. The core data model of BigFix Service Management is horizontally scalable and can support different business functions in an enterprise.

Question: What types of system performance monitoring tools does BigFix Service Management provide?

Answer: For the SaaS version, there is a dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team that continuously monitors and manages the availability, latency, performance, and efficiency of BigFix Service Management using industry-standard third-party monitoring and observability tools to ensure high reliability.

For the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version, customers are responsible for monitoring their own infrastructure and application performance. However, HCL provides guidelines and recommendations on integrating performance monitoring tools, and supports standard logging and metrics that can be used with tools like Grafana, or any enterprise monitoring solution of the customer's choice.

Question: What are the deployment and architecture considerations for the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version of BigFix Service Management?

Answer: The Self-Hosted version requires planning around infrastructure sizing, high availability, and integrations. HCL provides best practices and deployment guidance tailored to customer environments. For more details, refer to: https://knowledge.dryice.ai/t/hcl-sx-on-premise-deployment-architecture-and-considerations/352