Reporting - Should it be Easier?

[Denise P. Kalm]

Some of us have done a LOT of SAS coding, worked with a variety of products, but it still seems like it takes too long (and too much knowledge of the database) to get the information we need in the format we want. And new people are unlikely to want to sweat thru the learning curve we have. Some vendors do a lot of canned reports (good, if they are the right ones, but no flexibilty), others expect you to roll your own. In a perfect world, what would you like to see in reporting?

[Carl Kyonka]

- The messy, time-consuming part of reporting is marshalling the correct data. So anything that makes it easy to get the right data would be helpful.
- Having a customizable template with all the right context would be helpful. For example, a place for the object of the report (server name, application, transaction) , the time frame, metric selected, author, source of data, time the report was produced. If there is a pertinent standard from academic publications, that might be pertinent.
- Automatic drill-down to supporting details.
- Making it easy to change the report/analysis parameters so users spend time analyzing rather than formatting.
- Clearly worded warnings of any assumptions not met by the analysis or low confidence levels.
- Fast paths to any follow-on reports or analyses that logically flow from the current one.
- Links to pertinent documentation about the report/analysis (CMG articles maybe?)

[tscottt]

I have also worked in many situations doing capacity planning over the past years, and I've had to do a lot of custom reporting for each client. Eventually, I decided to make a set of generic tools to do data federation / analysis and reporting (look forCapacity Integrator on YouTube). But aside from touting that, I recommend you look at Oracle APEX. It's a free RAD environment that does a great job with reporting, and it's backed by a fully capable and FREE Oracle database (oracle xe). Since I've done so much work over the years with custom databases and analytics and reporting via excel / spss etc., it was great to find an all-in-one environment for doing most of what needs to be done with CM.

BTW: I'm not associated with Oracle. I'm just impressed with the potential of their APEX for CM applications.

-Scott