We prefer KACE to stick to what its good at (expertly managing clients), and graciously allow the admins the freedom to use Reporting tools that are good at what they do (massaging data and drawing pictures). Of course it is very appreciated to have some minimal reporting and KACE is doing well at that, no issues there. But when it comes to majorly working on data, blending data, trying to perform big-data type analysis with data from other sources (like vulnerability scanners, license databases, AntiVirus databases, etc - the patching relates to other Security databases!!), this requires getting the data OUT of KACE into a reporting product. This does not come easy. As anyone else who knows the value of the KACE data, I want to include Labels in my queries, which end up generating a ton of records/rows, and fill up the /tmp directory which crashes the query. A remote MySQL connection has to be used to pull the data, there is no way such a report would run from the HTTP GUI. Im not a SQL coder here, but I have to get in there and machete my way through a jungle of SQL to get the data out, its just the way it is right now, hours and hours just to get to the point where I can analyze the output. And in my case, the queries crash, so I cannot get the data. It doesnt have to be this way.

I would like to request that KACE provide the user the ability to run very large SQL queries. A start would be to modify the OS and the MySQL setup in such a way to allow very large /tmp directories (currently only 500MB). Or whatever is needed to allow very large SQL queries to occur, I cannot say what all that is. I envision a button on the GUI under the Reporting tab: Run a Large Query (state on there it will take a while, but it will complete up to 5 Gigs - or something).

Being able to get this data out and blend it with other data is the key to the future. Until the day Dell buys out Crystal Reports or Tableau, KACE should keep doing great at what it does well and give admins the freedom to do chose reporting. Thanks.