Generating reports from within the RSA Identity Governance & Lifecyle solution is critical for providing visibility and insights across an organizations governance processes and identity and access data. Reporting helps organizations understand and communicate various aspects of their governance coverage, compliance and access-assurance posture, including data changes, process statuses, metrics, and so forth.
Customers can create various reports to obtain this visibility and insights, and we provide many out-of-the-box (OOTB) reports as templates, which are utilized to setup and configure specific business reports. These templates are considered a starting point; which customers add the necessary filters, data elements, specification criteria and tailor to their specific business requirements. The existing OOTB report templates provide a foundation for customers to create their own focused reports. A report template without any filters, data elements or selection criteria specified will return information from all of the data in the database. Overtime, these types of reports will start to slow down as the solution maintains more data, and if the report results are also stored, it will also start to consume more data storage within the database.
The recommended practice is for customers to use the OOTB reports as templates for creating their own reports by adding the necessary filters, data elements and specification criteria. This allows the report to optimally return target information specific to business requirements.
The following are some steps to highlight the difference:
Here we are running the default report Review Coverage
The review is to show coverage of users in a review. When we execute the review and find it report it shows the coverage for all the reviews in the system.
While this report provides beneficial information the ability to go through the report can be cumbersome as the number of reviews increase. So consider filtering the report.
The first thing we will do is to create a new report. Here we will create a name to indicate there is some filtering. It will use the same report template as the out of the box report.
Next we go to the "Filter Criteria" tab.
Clicking on the "Add More" button we are given the ability to add a filter. Here were are going to use the name of a specific review. Once we enter the filter we use the "Preview" button at the bottom to confirm we have entered the correct value.
At that point we save the report by pressing "OK" and can see the new report in our list.
We can now run the report and generate a much smaller precise report in a shorter amount of time.