How Does SAS IT Resource Management Work?

SAS IT Resource Management supports adapters for many of the most popular network system and application management tools across the Windows, UNIX, and z/OS operating environments. It also provides the tooling for the creation of user-written adapters for any data source that is not natively supported by the solution. In doing so, it takes advantage of SAS®9 and the enterprise-class solutions that SAS® 9 provides, such as:
  • SAS Data Integration Studio
    This solution provides flexible data integration and specific IT Resource Management 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. These services enable you to perform the following tasks:
    • Create and maintain the IT data marts that are the containers for the staging, aggregation, information map, and report jobs as well as the staged tables and libraries, the aggregation tables and libraries, and the information maps that are created by or used by SAS IT Resource Management.
    • Create, maintain, and deploy the jobs that populate the IT data mart.
    • Calculate new columns and statistics from the input data.
    • Create and run the jobs that aggregate the data.
    • Create analysis and report-ready data sources from the aggregated data.
    • Create and run jobs that produce IT intelligence reports.
  • SAS Enterprise Guide
    This solution provides comprehensive reporting definition services. Report tasks can be run interactively in SAS Enterprise Guide projects by running the branches of a project that include those report tasks.
    Each SAS Enterprise Guide project that SAS IT Resource Management supplies includes one or more ITRM Gallery tasks. ITRM Gallery tasks publish the report definitions to the SAS Metadata Server so that the SAS IT Resource Management client can include that report definition in a report job. Those jobs are then deployed and scheduled for execution in batch mode. The resulting report output can be accessed by the Gallery Manager web application.
  • Gallery Manager
    This Web-based application manages and organizes report output that is stored on the SAS Content Server. Filters are available to use in organizing the report output.
  • SAS Business Intelligence Platform
    This platform uses the SAS Foundation technology, which includes the following software: Base SAS, SAS/GRAPH, the Output Delivery System (ODS), and other technologies. It also uses the following components:
    • SAS Information Map Studio: This product provides easy access to data using business-oriented terminology. Information maps that are created by the information map transformation in the SAS IT Resource Management client can be read and modified by SAS Information Map Studio.
    • 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, report tasks, report jobs, and more.
    • SAS Web Report Studio: This Web-based, interactive query and analysis tool simplifies and standardizes access to and reporting of performance information.
    • SAS Information Delivery Portal: This customizable portal provides corporate decision makers with easy access to the data that is most pertinent to them 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.
    • The BI Dashboard is a Web-based interface that displays within SAS Information Delivery Portal. Using data and information maps from multiple sources, information consumers and performance analysts users can create dashboards that display information that is pertinent to their areas of interest.
    • SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office: This product enables integration with commonly used Microsoft products such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
    • SAS Statistics, High Performance Forecasting, and Econometric Time Series: These solutions provide a complete set of SAS statistical methods for IT data analysis.
For more information, see Chapter 1, "General Overview" of SAS IT Resource Management: Administrator's Guide.