Working with SAS IT Resource Management

Dynamically Summarized Reporting

SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 enables you to perform all of the data transformations that are necessary to produce analysis and report-ready data before generating reports. You can use the SAS technologies that are available in the SAS IT Resource Management client that are specifically designed for data integration to prepare IT data for analysis and reporting. This will improve the performance of SAS IT Resource Management reporting and the system as a whole.

In earlier versions of SAS IT Resource Management, the performance data warehouse (PDB) structure limited the solution to predefined time period summarizations. In response, SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 reporting macros evolved to perform special time-based summarizations that were calculated at the time of report generation. In SAS IT Resource Management 3.2, the IT data mart structure replaces the PDB and enables you to summarize data through the SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 transformation. Therefore, dynamic summarization capabilities are no longer provided by the %CP report macros.

The SAS IT Resource Management Adapter Setup wizard provides several of the summarized aggregations that were typically created at the time of report generation by SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 report macros.

SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 includes formulas that support various time periods. By choosing the aging columns for your summarized aggregations that use these new formulas, you can create summarized aggregations that provide the equivalent dynamic summarization that is available in SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 reporting. For more information about creating custom aggregations, see the “Creating Aggregation Tables with the Summarized Aggregation Table Wizard” topic in the SAS IT Resource Management: Administrator’s Guide.

Working with Migrated PDBs

With few exceptions, column names and labels are preserved when migrating a SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 PDB to a SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 IT data mart. Therefore, user-written SAS code that is not dependent on SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 report macros can be submitted to re-create existing reports with minimal changes.

Here are a few tips for re-creating existing reports:

The DATETIME column that was required in SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 is no longer required in SAS IT Resource Management 3.2. In summarized aggregations, the columns DAYDATE, WEEKDATE, MONTHDATE, and YEARDATE are used instead.
Table names have changed. The level name is now appended to the original name. For example, a table with the original name SARDEV in the DETAIL library is now named SARDEV_DETAIL.
SAS IT Resource Management tables are now physical SAS data sets rather than SAS DATA step views. Code that requires views as input will not work.
Additional columns are created in the staged table to convert COUNT, TIME, and TIMETICKS type variables into rates. The rate variables are what should be specified in the summarized aggregation for computing statistics that are compatible with SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 reporting.

For more details about these changes and for more information about migrating PDBs and working with migrated PDBs, see the SAS IT Resource Management 3.21 Migration Documentation.