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 provides, such as these solutions:
  • 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, exception, and report jobs. Create and maintain the staged tables and libraries, the aggregation tables and libraries, the information maps, report definitions, and exception definitions 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, percentiles, percent changes, and so on, 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 and exception 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 is supplied by SAS IT Resource Management includes one or more ITRM Report Definition tasks. ITRM Report Definition tasks publish the report definitions to the SAS Metadata Server. 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 ITRM Report Center.
  • ITRM Report Center
    This web-based application manages and organizes report output that is stored in the SAS Content Server. Filters are available to use in organizing the report output in galleries.
    ITRM Report Center provides access to the Home, Gallery, Resource, and Administration workspaces. The Home, Gallery, and Resource workspaces enable users and administrators to manage reports, galleries, and resources. The Administration workspace enables administrators to perform specialized tasks, such as creating and assigning locations in the SAS Content Server, deleting reports from the SAS Content Server, and updating the list of available alerts that appear in the Home workspace.
  • 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. These objects include 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. This data includes 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 is displayed 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.
    • SAS Visual Analytics SAS Visual Analytics Administration and Reporting: This web-based product suite uses SAS high-performance analytic technologies to enable organizations to interact graphically with huge volumes data to discover business insights.
      Note: SAS IT Resource Management does not include the Explorer component of SAS Visual Analytics.
For more information, see Chapter 1, "General Overview," in SAS IT Resource Management 3.5: Administrator's Guide.
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