Has anybody done or seen reports generated from Remedy data using SAS?
We have such a setup that has worked fairly ok so far, but since there is no
longer any SAS expertise in house, I'm trying to figure out if I should keep
SAS or move away from it to what's more common...such as Business Objects. If
anybody (a university?) is using SAS for this purpose, I would like to know
what they think about SAS vs other tools (such as Business Object) for Remedy
reporting.
I inherited this fairly impressive report generation mechanism built using SAS
(v9) scripts. It builds daily, weekly and monthly reports for different groups.
Each group's (or each area's, meaning a cluster of groups') report is available
over the web as a set of static html files.
By clicking around, different reports showing different breakdowns of the same
data is seen. Some reports can be drilled down to get to the actual tickets
behind the data. There are many graphs too.
It has worked pretty ok so far, and I have become good at doing some light
maintenance/update.
What impresses me about SAS is the ease with which data can be manipulated by
SAS scripts with a few lines of script. And how easily reports/graphs can be
produced. A few lines do what would take many many lines in other platforms.
One downside is that connection to Remedy is at the database tables level, but
using views it's not too bad. To think of it, BO does the same thing anyway.
I am more familiar with BO/Crystal Reports. The big difference I see is that
with BO, the report layout and delivery is emphasized, with the understanding
that data is already pretty much laid out in the right format.
With SAS, because of its original purpose (statistical analysis), you can
easily manipulate, slice, dice data or merge data from different sources on the
fly. Our scripts do quite a lot of this. If I go with BO (during an ARS/ITSM
upgrade), I will have to deal with this data manipulation/merge.
Anyway, those are the random thoughts for today. If you have any comment,
please....well...comment.
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