Introduction to SAS IT Resource Management

What Is SAS IT Resource Management?

Information Technology managers need to access, manage, integrate, manipulate, analyze, and share information about large quantities of performance data for many IT resources (such as hardware, operating system software, networks, Web servers, databases, and applications). As such, IT performance evaluation software requires technology that can work with performance data from these many different sources, summarize and analyze that data, and provide reports that permit quick and accurate analyses of a company's IT resources from current, historical, and forecasted perspectives. The SAS solution to this critical business challenge is SAS IT Resource Management (ITRM).
Note: The SAS IT Resource Management solution has more than one version of software. Throughout this document, the software for SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 or earlier contains the version number (for example, SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 or earlier). The software for SAS IT Resource Management 3.1.1 or later does not contain the version number and is referred to as SAS IT Resource Management.
SAS IT Resource Management provides many IT domain intelligence features. For example, it provides the following features:
  • a comprehensive IT performance management and capacity planning data model for supported adapters
  • the Adapter Setup wizard, which facilitates the efficient specification of the extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs, analysis, and reporting processes for many IT resources
  • tools for the creation of user-written adapters
  • supplied report definitions that facilitate IT resource analysis
SAS IT Resource Management is built on SAS®. It provides the IT data mart structure, staging and aggregation code for specialized ETL processing of IT data sources, unique plug-ins to SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide. and a Web-based Gallery Manager application for the distribution and organization of IT intelligence reports. SAS IT Resource Management also supplies the IT Resource Management Gallery Manager application. Gallery Manager is a Web-based application that enables the many reports that are produced by the SAS IT Resource Management solution to be grouped, filtered, and managed in logical containers called galleries.

SAS IT Resource Management Functionality

SAS IT Resource Management can be used to resolve a variety of systems management challenges within an organization. It provides the functionality to do the following tasks:
  • support (access, read, stage, aggregate, and report on) many popular network and systems management tools across hardware platforms, operating system environments, networks, Web servers, databases, and applications.
  • establish IT data marts that contain the IT resource management data from data sources that the enterprise.
  • create common references to common measurements that are available in disparate data sources. This functionality ensures that the IT data mart provides an independent set of measurements that can be analyzed across the IT enterprise.
  • calculate standardized measurements, units, and statistics to populate the IT data mart with analysis and report-ready data.
  • define Aggregation transformations that are specific to the time-based summarizations and statistical measurements that are necessary to accommodate a site's analysis and reporting needs.
  • provide the ability to create graphical and textual reports that contain all the information that is needed to manage current day IT operations.
  • use SAS IT domain knowledge for performance management, capacity planning, IT resource forecasting, prediction, peak period and seasonality analysis, time-based analysis, workload analysis, and enterprise IT performance summaries that complement existing IT utilization, availability, and performance analysis capabilities.
  • provide a variety of report output mediums to accommodate the needs of the data administrators, performance analysts, and high-level information consumers.
It also takes advantage of SAS®9 and the enterprise-class solutions that SAS®9 provides, such as:
  • SAS Data Integration Studio
    The SAS IT Resource Management solution provides additional IT-specific features and functionality to the data management capabilities of SAS Data Integration Studio. These additional ITRM features and functions are seamlessly integrated with those of SAS Data Integration Studio. The enhanced capabilities of SAS Data Integration Studio that are delivered by SAS IT Resource Management are commonly referred to as the SAS IT Resource Management client, throughout this document. They are labeled accordingly in the SAS IT Resource Management software.
    The SAS Data Integration Studio solution provides flexible data integration services for most data sources. These services perform most of the data preparation and aggregation work that is needed to analyze and report on resource performance. You can use SAS Data Integration Studio to perform the following tasks:
    • create and maintain the IT data marts that are the containers for the information maps, ETL jobs, tables, templates, data, and libraries that are created by or used by SAS IT Resource Management.
    • create and run the processes that stage data in preparation for use by the Aggregation transformations.
    • calculate new fields of data from the input data.
    • create and run the processes that aggregate the data.
  • SAS Statistics and Econometric Time Series
    This solution provides a complete set of SAS statistical methods for IT data analysis.
  • SAS Enterprise Guide
    This solution provides comprehensive report definition and reporting services. Report definitions that are created in this solution can be run interactively within SAS Enterprise Guide, or they can be scheduled to run in batch mode.
  • SAS Intelligence Platform
    This platform uses the SAS Foundation technology, which includes the following software: Base SAS, SAS/GRAPH, SAS/STAT, the Output Delivery System (ODS), and other technologies. It also provides access to the following components:
    • SAS Information Map Studio: This product provides the functionality to create business-oriented data sources that are appropriate for all users, expert to novice, when designing and creating reports.
    • SAS Web Report Studio: This Web-based, interactive query and analysis tool simplifies and standardizes access to and reporting of performance evaluation information.
    • SAS Metadata Repository: This repository of centralized metadata stores information about the objects that are created and used by SAS IT Resource Management, such as IT data marts, ETL jobs, information maps, and more.
    • SAS Information Delivery Portal: This open Java portal is a customizable portal that provides corporate decision makers with easy access to the data that is most pertinent to them. It enables users to access data by means of reports and dashboards, such as key performance indicators (KPIs), filter reports, and more. SAS Information Delivery Portal enables the selective and secure dissemination of information throughout an organization.
    • SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office: This product enables integration with commonly used Microsoft products such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
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