Competitor pricing and feature information updated March 2026.
Overview of BMC Remedy IT Service Management
A lot has changed over the history of BMC. Not just ownership but also the name of their service desk tool. From ARS, to Remedy, to ITSM, and now to Helix ITSM, one thing has stayed the same, BMC has always been one of the leaders in enterprise help desk solutions. BMC Remedy Service Management is a service management platform that's available as an on-premise or a cloud-based solution. From basic change tasking and simple Help Desk control to cloud lifecycle management, BMC can help organizations save money, become more productive, and improve customer service.The Challenge of BMC Remedy's Reporting Capabilities
The reporting in Remedy has evolved over the years. From open-source options such as BIRT, to Crystal Report and Business Object integration, BMC Dashboards and Analytics, and most recently, Smart Reporting, a white-label implementation of Yellowfin BI. While reporting has improved, Remedy's reporting capabilities are still limited, unless you have a lot of internal expertise and resources to work with the tools they offer. In many cases, reporting comes at an additional cost which many find cost-prohibitive. Sadly these days we see a lot of BMC ITSM customers jumping ship and migrating over to ServiceNow or other enterprise options. And when they do that they are faced with a tough decision of what to do with their legacy data. The cost of keeping licenses running doesn't make sense and in many cases, the cost of migrating the data into the new vendor is expensive and akin to trying to push a square peg into a round circle (jump down to the section on DashboardFox if you want to learn more about how we solve this issue). The net result, typically generating custom reports and dashboards from BMC ITSM, specifically, ones that may combine data from your other IT systems can be a pain. We're going to list a couple of options that you can check out to help with this struggle.Best Dashboard and Reporting Options For BMC Help Desk.
When it comes to choosing the best dashboard and reporting solution for BMC Remedy, it's not one size fits all. You must determine your organization's technical and financial resources, outline what you're trying to accomplish, and research each product. To help you get started, we've provided an overview of a handful of popular tools, including DashboardFox which we feel is one of the most robust not just for BMC but for any data source you need to be integrated with BMC data.Microsoft Power BI for BMC
This is the tool we most often find businesses attempting to use with BMC ITSM. In many cases, they may already use Power BI in their organization and the top brass gives the technical team an instruction to try to connect it to BMC. It's not as easy as it seems. BMC ITSM has one of the more complicated and cryptic databases of any service management tool that we have worked with. So unless you are an experienced BMC developer, the average BI person won't have a clue. Organizations looking to leverage Power BI are going to struggle and spend a lot of time and effort before realizing they still cannot get the level of flexibility and customization they are looking for. Power BI simply shifts the responsibility from one technical resource to another, it doesn't open up the data to business users. Power BI Pro costs $14 per user per month (up 40% from $10 in April 2025), and Premium Per User runs $24 per user per month. For enterprise features like row-level security, you'll need Premium or Fabric capacity starting around $5,000 monthly. There's no white-labeling capability at any tier, and you're limited to 1GB datasets on Pro. Most importantly for BMC users, Power BI requires significant Microsoft ecosystem expertise that doesn't transfer well to BMC's complex database structure.Tableau Software for BMC
Tableau is a part of Salesforce these days but many organizations have a Microsoft Power BI-life relationship with Tableau. It's part of their enterprise BI toolkit and there is heavy pressure to leverage it for anything reporting related (as the top brass spent a lot of money on that enterprise agreement). Organizations attempting to use Tableau for BMC dashboards and reports will find the same struggle as the ones we discussed above with Power BI. Deciphering those tables and relationships in BMC ITSM is tough. And if you attempt to report via the Remedy API, you're going to be limited in speed, report size, and also to authorized licensed users. Tableau pricing has become increasingly complex with Standard Creator licenses at $75 monthly and Enterprise Creator at $115 monthly (annual commitment required). Even basic Explorer access runs $42-70 per month depending on tier. While Tableau added custom subdomains in August 2025, this isn't true white-labeling. For row-level security with BMC data, you'll need Enterprise plus the Data Management add-on. The bottom line: you could easily spend over $1,000 monthly for just 25 Explorer users, and you still won't have solved BMC's complex database mapping challenges.PureShare
Pureshare was acquired by Teamquest in 2015 and in 2016 Teamquest was acquired by HelpSystems. We're not sure if they still do BMC dashboards and reports or not, but they used to be a viable option. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, PureShare is an enterprise software product company that's focused on metrics management. Its clients include several major organizations, such as Microsoft, Time Warner Cable, and Frito Lay. PureShare for BMC Remedy automates gathering, consolidation, and publishing of IT performance metrics dashboards and supports real-time connectivity to a variety of systems, including Contact Center ACDs, event management platforms, project/HR management, security management systems and more. PureShare offers user-configurable views for executives, customers, and staff and provides stakeholders a single system to go to for real-time operations performance metrics from all sources.Xtraction
Landesk acquired Xtraction back in 2015 and they were subsequently acquired by Ivanti. If you're not familiar, Ivanti used to be FrontRange the maker of the help desk software, Heat. So we're doubtful that Xtraction is still an option for BMC Remedy. Xtraction Solutions, Inc. was founded in 2011 and provides out of the box solutions for major service management platforms, including BMC Remedy. Xtraction, its self-service reporting solution, is used by a number of well-known companies including Ace Hardware, McAfee, and GoDaddy.com. The product aims to deliver information quickly and professionally and allows users to access dashboards at any time using an iPad application. With Xtraction, users can drill down into charts to discover details, share reports by scheduling Xtraction content to email or network folders, and more.Northcraft Analytics
Northcraft specializes in providing business intelligence applications for enterprise IT departments. Headquartered in Marietta, Georgia, Northcraft's customers include ExxonMobile, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. Northcraft for BMC Remedy allows developers to move seamlessly from web-based reports to individual items in BMC Remedy's system to handle urgent items directly. It also offers executive dashboards and pre-packaged key performance indicators across 10 process areas.Westbury Analytics
Founded in 1998, Westbury is acknowledged as a veteran provider of operational reporting solutions for IT organizations. Westbury's SMI BMC Remedy supports all processes in the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite and allows developers to create reports not only looking at individual processes but also at the crossover between related processes, all in one report. It offers more than 30 fully customizable startup reports, and each report can be copied, or customized.How DashboardFox Integrates with BMC ITSM
OK, we sort of teed you up with the list above. The truth is BMC is a legacy solution these days and while a lot of companies used to integrate and support their product, many if not most of them have been acquired or gone out of business these days. The good news, as an organization, we've had an integration with BMC that dates back to version 6.x of BMC Remedy.DashboardFox is a new brand, but the underlying technology has been around since 1999 and even more impressively, we're still developing, supporting, and innovating the solution. No dead software here.DashboardFox is an agile, user-friendly tool that provides an extensive selection of out of the box report types for BMC Remedy IT Service Desk. They include:
- People
- Configuration Items
- Incident Management
- Change Management
- Problem Management
- Request Management
- Work Order Management
- Knowledge Management
- Surveys
- CI Computer System
- CI Equipment
- CI Document
- CI IPEndpoint
- All Task
- Known Errors.
