Altiris IT Analytics 6.1 User's Guide

Altiris IT Analytics 6.1 User's Guide

Smart business decisions are the direct result of having the right information at the right time. In today's ever changing world of IT Management, most decisions are based o highly formatted reports intended to answer pre-determined questions with little interaction or analysis from the end user. In many scenarios this is sufficient, but if ne questions arise or more information is required that is not contained in the report, end users generally have to rely on another party for modifications to the report, creation of a new report, or specialized one-time queries. This generally leaves decision makers in the frustrating position of not having timely access to the information they need, resulting in decisions being made too late or based on educated guesses rather than real actionable information.

As a complement to traditional reporting, many organizations stand to gain substantially by incorporating the multi-dimensional analysis available through analytics. The goal of analytics is to provide a starting point for end users to explore data themselves, giving users the power to ask and answer their own questions. In most cases, analytics provides a fluid mechanism to run subsequent queries that are generated by the user, such as drilling down, drilling up, pivoting, and active filtering. This type of flexibility is what most people envision when they're promised the ability to run ad-hoc queries themselves. However, they usually find the capabilities they are delivered too limited in functionality or too complex for them to reduce their dependence on others to provide the information they need.