So, you have started your first report and got it to a point where it answers some questions and makes sense… now let’s delve into some more enhancements that are fairly common, and not too complex!
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This article is the continuation of the Amazon QuickSight Complete Guide Series, focusing on the topic of getting your QuickSight environment set up and ready to use. If you haven’t checked out the first installment of the Amazon QuickSight Complete Guide, covering Pricing and Editions, I would recommend you take a couple of minutes to check it out. The series of QuickSight posts will detail everything you need to know about QuickSight as well as some walkthroughs of the main tools.
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If you’re tuned in to trends and thought leadership in the world of data and analytics, you may have caught wind of the phrase “data mesh”. This article seeks to explain the concepts of data mesh in a succinct manner to those who have been immersed for some time in the realm of data and business intelligence/business analytics but haven’t yet learned enough to decide whether data mesh is just a trendy catch-phrase or a substantive new approach that can significantly improve the business value derived from data. (We firmly believe it’s the latter.)
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Let’s deep dive into how to improve the performance of a complicated report by utilizing MDX and switching to a multidimensional source to reduce the runtime of each selection to under 1 min.
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Planning Analytics allows you to make simple or complex budgeting models that can be effective for any aspect of your business including workforce planning. Your workforce model can be as precise as your requirements, whether you want to budget at a department level, position level, or employee level.
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QuickSight is rapidly evolving into a top-notch BI and data visualization tool and even entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI this last year. QuickSight is fundamentally a very good visualization and reporting platform, but with all the options available in the crowded BI market, what are the top reasons to choose Amazon QuickSight?
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IBM has recently released a "mobile app" designed to allow users to use dashboards and ask questions to the AI assistant. It works, but what it doesn't do is allow the consumption of pixel-perfect reports. When building a mobile-ready report, there are a few fundamental principles to adhere to. Read my article to make yourself a responsive mobile-ready Cognos report that pops.
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A key concept to understand when migrating to AWS is the physical distribution of cloud resources. AWS organizes its global infrastructure into Regions and Availability Zones (AZ). An AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers within a Region. When you deploy resources in AWS you must define the Region those resources are deployed to and one or more AZs. AWS best practices encourage deployments to be spread across multiple AZs (Multi-AZ) instead of isolating them to a single AZ. Why is this recommended? Read to find out more.
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One of the key focus areas for many organizations around the world today is automation. Whether it stems from growing customer demands, more complex tasks involved with delivering services, or the explosion of remote workplaces as a result of the pandemic, companies are more eager to embed automation into their processes today than ever before.
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Scheduled reports are a staple at most companies. Some companies have thousands that run each night and others may have just a few. If you’re new to Cognos and want to schedule and monitor your jobs, how do you keep up with all of the report runs and failures? And what are the options for a failure when you find one? Let’s break it down.
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The Planning Analytics Modeling Workbench is a new modeling tool for developers in Planning Analytics Workspace. It is a dedicated modeling area that has tabs and sections for organizing your modeling tasks and is optimized for all types of modeling activities in PA.
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An Application Load Balancer (ALB) may seem unnecessary when thinking about architecting Cognos on AWS. ALBs are most often used in serverless patterns or containerized applications. Those architectures obviously don’t apply to Cognos. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow design patterns from other architectures to benefit a Cognos deployment. Two reasons we recommend leveraging an ALB when deploying Cognos are simplified administration and improving your security posture.
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We’ve put together our list of the top 7 Cognos tips for June! Check it out and share your thoughts (or tips!) in the comments section.
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Improving payer financial operations and revenue cycle management are vital to the sustainability of hospitals and healthcare organizations. These organizations have already grown accustomed to looming financial challenges: wide-sweeping federal regulations, industry consolidation, and emerging reimbursement models have threatened to destabilize business as usual for years; then COVID-19 happened.
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Amazon (AWS) QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service. This means it is a cloud-based service that is globally available, has built-in redundancy, and enterprise-grade security. This allows your business to deliver easy-to-understand insights to users, regardless of their location. Because QuickSight is a relatively new BI tool, most people may be unfamiliar with its features and benefits. So, let us take a look at what differentiates QuickSight from other BI tools and then get into editions and pricing.
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Deploying Cognos on AWS immediately raises questions around the Cognos databases. What database type should we use? What service should we use to host them? Let’s dive in and hopefully, I can help you get a much clearer sense of what is best for your organization.
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Do you have a brand-new install of Cognos? What is the first thing you do after your install is done and you have configured Cognos? Start creating reports? Start building dashboards? No! You need to make sure you have security properly configured. Security is one of those things that often gets pushed off until the end of a project but it should be the first thing we do.
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At PMsquare, we see more and more companies moving Cognos workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The reasons for this move vary from company to company. There may be a desire to reduce architecture and administration costs, improve the reliability of the Cognos infrastructure, dissatisfaction with IBM’s SaaS offering, or the move to the cloud is being mandated by a larger company initiative. Whatever the reason, if you need to migrate Cognos to a public cloud you will likely have many questions and this blog series will answer them!
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When someone talks about security in Cognos Analytics, there are several things that they could be referring to. "Security" could mean making sure web traffic is encrypted with SSL or which capabilities a particular user has access to. It could also refer to what data a person is able to see. However, today I want to talk about the best practices around Cognos object security.
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In a prior issue, my colleague Brian Moore introduced us to the Forecasting feature now available in Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW). Today we take an in-depth look at the steps to set up a Preview forecast and to apply a forecast to your model.
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