Working with SAS IT Resource Management

Dynamically Summarized Reporting

SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 and later versions of the solution enable 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 improves 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 (and later releases of the solution), the IT data mart structure replaces the PDB and enables you to summarize data by means of transformations. 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 (and later releases of the solution) include 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 Chapter 8, “Aggregating the Data,” in the SAS IT Resource Management 3.5: 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 an IT data mart in SAS IT Resource Management 3.2 (and later releases of the solution). 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 (and later releases of the solution). In summarized aggregations, the columns DAYDATE, WEEKDATE, MONTHDATE, and YEARDATE are used instead. The labels for these columns are Date, StartOfWeek, StartOfMonth, and StartOfYear, respectively.
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.
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 Chapter 4, “Migrating SAS ITRM 2.6 and 2.7 PDBs to SAS ITRM 3.5 IT Data Marts,” in the SAS IT Resource Management 3.5: Migration Guide.