From a technology and non-BMC perspective I would add the following to what David Easter said:
ITSM Reports: These are basic AR System and Crystal reports that are used for very basic things. Odds are, these will get you started with ITSM reporting, but at the end of the day the vast majority will not be what IT management really wants. Instead they will want something specifically catered to your company's processes and organization. BMC Analytics: This sort of resolves the issues with the out of the box ITSM reports. You get even more out of the box reports, a whole lot more than the basic ootb ITSM reports, and some really useful ones. However, the greatest thing BMC Analytics gives you is a Business Objects universe for building new reports. If you're not familiar with Business Objects terminology, a universe is basically a schema for the data that already has relationships, data translation, some calculated values, etc. all in one place so your users can use a simple drag and drop interface to build their own reports without needing to understand the actual database structure. Oh, and you can customize the universe too, if you need reports on things that aren't covered such as Work Orders with custom fields included. BMC Dashboard: In my opinion, you will probably be better off building a set of custom reports using BMC Analytics to provide this functionality. It looks slick and probably works well if you are in a purely out of the box environment, but I've never worked somewhere that stayed 100% out of the box so I've found that custom dashboards that are tied to your specific business processes are the best solution, even if they don't have all the bells and whistles of the Dashboard application. Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Southern Union Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.sug.com/disclaimers/default.htm#Mail . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender.
