General
Question: What are different deployment options available for BigFix Service Management?
Answer: The customer has the option to choose from any of the below-mentioned deployment options:
Multi-tenant / Single Tenant Public Cloud, Choice of Cloud – Private, Self Hosted (On Premise)
Question: What is the underlying platform for BigFix Service Management?
Answer: The underlying platform for BigFix Service Management SaaS version is AWS cloud-hosted out of AWS data centers.
The hosting location is selected based on the location preference for dedicated customers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data Center Locations - Amazon Cloud Infrastructure – Server Locations
Additionally, customers have the flexibility to choose a different cloud provider, such as Azure or Google Cloud, or opt for a self-hosted (on-premise) deployment.
Question: Are customizations allowed?
Answer: BigFix Service Management is a highly configurable product. In addition, it does not require any specialized skill set to operate and is suited for all segments of customers.
Question: What is the availability of SLA?
Answer: Availability SLA is 99.5% except for excused outages like
- Scheduled maintenance
- Customer’s system malfunction
- Circumstances beyond the service provider’s control
Question: What is the support policy?
Answer: HCLSoftware Customer Support portal acts as a platform for customers to raise support requests via their designated SPOC/App admin, ensuring these requests are addressed. It streamlines the resolution of support requests and issues arising from unusual product behaviour.
Depending on the nature of the support request, different teams may get involved in the lifecycle of the support request:
- The customer support team provides the first level of support for issues relating to user registration, password reset, and issues with the application.
- Depending on the nature of the request, the site reliability engineering team (for availability issues of the instance) or the DevOps team (for bugs and hotfixes) may be involved.
Designated users can access Product Support online through https://support.hcl-software.com/csm
Question: Where can I find the SLO (Service Level Objectives)?
Answer: For the SaaS version of BigFix Service Management, SLOs related to availability, uptime, and managed services are defined in the HCL BigFix Service Management Service Description - https://www.hcl-software.com/wps/wcm/connect/77122470-3249-4375-bbd5-8ea45c1cbf4e/HCL-BigFix-Service-Management-SD.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CONVERT_TO=url&CACHEID=ROOTWORKSPACE-77122470-3249-4375-bbd5-8ea45c1cbf4e-pu3LYBS
Product-level technical support is governed by the HCLSoftware Support Guide - https://support.hcl-software.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0010420
For Self-Hosted (On-Premise) deployments, customers manage their own infrastructure, so hosting-related SLOs do not apply; only product support is provided as per the Support Guide.
Question: How easy is the installation process? Is any manual process involved?
Answer: BigFix Service Management SaaS version is a cloud-native solution. Once the instance is provisioned, no manual installation is required. Clients simply access the application via the provided URL and credentials.
For the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version, installation is straightforward and handled by HCL’s professional services team. The process is guided, streamlined, and designed to get customers up and running with minimal effort on their part.
Question: What is the customer onboarding/ off-boarding process followed in BigFix Service Management?
Answer: BigFix Service Management can integrate with identity providers such as Azure AD, to replicate the foundation data in customer BigFix Service Management instance from its people directory. Alternatively, customers may fill in the BigFix Service Management data collection template that gathers details to ingest foundation data into BigFix Service Management.
Other steps involved in the onboarding process include:
- Catalog creation and Aggregation
- Setting up the configurations
- Setting up the required integrations
Question: How are services onboarded and offboarded in BigFix Service Management?
Answer: There are two modes of onboarding any offering in BigFix Service Management
- Manual Aggregation - Service, catalog managers, will configure and deploy any offering to be made available in the service catalog.
- Automatic Aggregation – BigFix Service Management can be integrated with external systems through BigFix Service Management Integration Engine for automatically publishing external vendor catalogs on BigFix Service Management.
- Offboarding – Catalog managers can expire/ suspend the offerings to remove them from the service catalog.
Question: How are approval workflows configured in BigFix Service Management?
Answer: BigFix Service Management supports entitlement and role-based access. Approvals can be configured against different components in BigFix Service Management (service, offerings, items, etc.). Approval levels can be created as well. Provision to configure approvals against both, individuals and groups, is available.
Question: Which internet browsers are supported to access BigFix Service Management?
Answer: BigFix Service Management supports all major browsers, such as Safari, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge.
Question: Is there a mobile application?
Answer: BigFix Service Management, has a Progressive web App (PWA), which can be accessed on any device and from any location.
PWA is a new technology that allows the website to be stored on your device. It creates an icon in the form of a website app, which works like any mobile application upon opening.
Generally, when applications are built, they need to be developed for different platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows, but in the case of PWA, there is no need to develop and maintain separate applications for different platforms.
Question: Can the product scale to meet your number of supported users and geographies?
Answer: Yes, the SaaS version of BigFix Service Management being a cloud solution, is highly scalable and can easily be extended to meet the increased number of support users and geographies. It is right sized to meet the customer’s needs today and scalable to grow with future needs easily.
For the Self-Hosted (On-Premise) version, the product is architected to support enterprise-grade scalability. It can be deployed across geographies and sized appropriately based on the customer’s infrastructure capacity and user load. HCL’s professional services team ensures the deployment is right-sized to meet both current and future scalability requirements.