The Top Issues with BMC Smart Reporting

BMC ITSM recently made a significant shift in its out-of-the-box reporting strategy. As we’ve mentioned in the past, BMC used to white label SAP BusinessObjects as its reporting tool and branded it as BMC Analytics. With its most recent update, BMC ditched SAP Business Objects and now white labels Yellowfin BI and has branded its new reporting tool as BMC Smart Reporting.

Though BMC Smart Reporting is an improvement over BMC Analytics, since its release we’ve had a number of customers reach out to us because of the issues they have run into with BMC Smart Reporting. Below are the top issues customers have encountered with BMC Smart Reporting:

BMC Smart Reporting lacks the ability to complete complex database joins. BMC delivers pre-set views off of its Remedy database schema, which is an incredibly complex schema. Though BMC Smart Reporting can report across multiple forms within its database schema and create custom views, many customers are realizing are that there are certain complex joins that BMC Smart Reporting cannot complete. We’re not sure if this is an underlying issue within Yellowfin BI, or if it’s a limitation Yellowfin BI has set within its white label version. One situation we see frequently with BMC customers is that issues crop up when a customer needs to build a consolidated report across change, incident, problem, and request management. Though BMC Smart Reporting has views for each individual report, users who want to combine the reports into one view are unable to do so. BMC has confirmed with customers that it cannot complete these advanced joins.

Yurbi’s Solution: Within Yurbi, we have a different approach. Instead of setting up pre-set views across the database, Yurbi features a Yurbi App which provides users the ability to customize reports, conduct application-level joins, do data transformation, and build any other database relationship to execute more complex reports.

Click here to download “Top 3 Data Blindspots in Service Management Reporting”

BMC Smart Reporting only works with the Remedy database. Users cannot use BMC Smart Reporting to pull in and report on data from other databases. BMC Smart Reporting can only report on data housed within a company’s AR forms. This is a critical limitation because the value of the data contained within a company’s BMC ITSM becomes even more important when users need to compare data among multiple databases. For example, if a user wants to conduct a cost-per-ticket analysis for their helpdesk application, the user must be able to tie its financial data into your helpdesk data. Users cannot currently do this with BMC Smart Reporting.

Yurbi’s Solution: Yurbi doesn’t have database limitations. Yurbi can communicate with any database, import any Excel or CSV data into the application, and can bring any data together to create one, cohesive and custom report.


Users using BMC ITSM for a very custom application cannot use BMC Smart Reporting. Users who are using BMC ITSM for a custom application and are using Remedy 9 cannot use BMC Smart Reporting. In order to use BMC Smart Reporting, users must have a Remedy ITSM license. There are many BMC customers that have Remedy, but use it for custom internal applications instead of ITSM. Though BMC Smart Reporting can run reports off of those custom views, BMC will not allow users to run the reports without the Remedy ITSM license.

Yurbi’s Solution: Yurbi doesn’t rely on any of your licensing to access data within Remedy because Yurbi is able to work directly with your databases. Many of our customers that have Yurbi and Remedy have migrated their Remedy data to ServiceNow, and have turned off Remedy completely.


Companies cannot white label BMC Smart Reporting. Management Services Providers (MSP’s) that are using BMC ITSM as a platform to support their customers and want to provide their customers access to reports are unable to white label BMC Smart Reporting, which means that MSP customers are unable to receive a seamless reporting experience.

Yurbi’s Solution: Our customers are able to white label Yurbi and deliver reports that align with the customer’s brand with Yurbi’s CustomJS and CustomCSS features. Customers who white label Yurbi are not only able to customize the appearance of reports, but can customize reports’ functionality as well.

Additional, Smaller Issues

The above issues are the major issues our customers have encountered with BMC Smart Reporting. However, customers have disclosed additional smaller issues to us.

One smaller issue with BMC Smart Reporting is that though Smart Reporting has nice drill down, drill through, and drill anywhere features, users cannot include links within their reports that launch viewers into the Smart IT interface or Class ITSM interface. Contrarily, Yurbi allows users to include links within reports to take viewers to relevant outside resources.

Another smaller issue that BMC Smart Reporting users run into is that there is no dynamic security for reports, which means users must create new reports if some report information must be excluded. This is problematic if a user needs to share a report with many customers, but must censor some of the information for each customer. Yurbi fixes this manual process issue with App Shield, which allows users to dynamically change report information based upon different security profiles, without creating completely new reports.

The Bottom Line

BMC Smart Reporting with Yellowfin BI is a huge improvement over BMC Analytics with SAP Business Objects, and it has consolidated BMC’s other reporting tools. Companies that need basic reporting for their BMC ITSM database will likely enjoy BMC Smart Reporting.

However, for any medium-sized or larger organization that has a robust set of user requirements for reporting will likely need a BI solution that is able to carry out more complex reporting tasks. These types of organizations are discovering Yurbi and finding that Yurbi’s flexibility, ease of use, and affordability better fit their needs.

If you would like to see a demo of Yurbi’s BMC integration, feel free to schedule a demo with us. Also, if you have experienced any issues with BMC Smart Reporting, leave a comment below!

Click here to download “Top 3 Data Blindspots in Service Management Reporting”