Managing & Monitoring Cognos BI Systems
BY NIKITA ATKINS, PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT
Cognos BI systems can grow quickly and as a result Cognos Administrators often feel that the system is getting ‘out of control’. There is good news however thanks to a series of tools that allows you to monitor and manage the Cognos environment.
Cognos Auditing
IBM Cognos BI Enterprise provides a complete auditing capability that permits administrators to report on and manage system usage. By default, system messages, errors, and other product details are logged to flat files that reside in the <c10_install>/logs directory, however you can configure it to write to a database which allows you to run out-of-the-box audit reports.
The Cognos BI Audit deployment package can be found: <c10 install>\webcontent\samples\content\IBM_Cognos_Audit.zip
With the Cognos BI Audit package, Administrators can run the following reports:
Cognos Logging Levels
There are five levels of logging which controls what is sent to the audit logs/database. While the default is “”Basic”” these can be adjusted via the System tab in Cognos Administration. Key Logging Levels include:
|
Activity |
Minimal |
Basic |
Request |
Trace |
Full |
|
System and service startup and shutdown, runtime errors |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
User account management and runtime usage |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
User requests |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
Service Request and Response |
Yes |
Yes |
|||
|
All requests to all components with their parameter values |
Yes |
Yes |
|||
|
Other queries to IBM Cognos components (native query) |
Yes |
Yes |
Cognos Audit Extensions
While the standard auditing features that come out of the box with IBM Cognos BI cover many aspects of operation, some areas such as the auditing of users and capability assignments are not included. The aim of the c10AuditExtension application is to provide additional auditing for these areas. These include:
Cognos Content Store Auditing
The Cognos Content Store lies at the heart of Cognos BI. However it can be very difficult to decipher what is available in Cognos and who has permission to see which reports. Auditing and exploring the Cognos Content Store can be easily performed thanks to MotioPI.
MotioPI is a powerful FREE tool for Cognos BI that comes with 11 panels of utilities that allows Cognos Administrators to audit and manage the Cognos Content Store. These include:
Change Control, Testing and Release Management
Often in decentralised self-service report authoring environments, changes to reports can cause rapid growth in the size of the content store and cause increased risks from uncontrolled changes.
MotioCI integrates with Cognos through each stage of the business intelligence life cycle – from the initial development process to testing, to deployment and on-going maintenance. MotioCI provides higher performance, quality and manageability of Cognos through its unique blend of capabilities in version control, release management and automated testing.
MotioCI’s version control captures the Who, What, When and Why changes are made in Cognos. This includes:
MotioCI’s automated testing continuously monitors Cognos environments, uncovering issues early in the development cycle before they become critical defects. This includes:
Lastly MotioCI provides comprehensive Release Management for Cognos BI, which provides a better method for automating and specifying when and what content to deploy to new Cognos environments. Features include:
More Information
For more information on how to improve the management, monitoring and administration of your Cognos BI system, please contact us at info@cornerstone.com.au
