Psst! Hey you…yeah…the one with the large Cognos Query Studio and Analysis Studio footprint. You know those studios have been around since 2005, right? Those were the Cognos 8 days! We know that there are still plenty of shops with Query Studio and/or Analysis Studio artifacts in use…but times, they are a changin’.
Read MoreWith all the talk about cloud computing these days, does it really make sense to move your Cognos Analytics instance to the cloud? What functionality and benefits are gained or lost when doing so? What about when starting from scratch? What is the best option for your Cognos Analytics (CA) environment? There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes down to it. We’ll discuss the differences which, hopefully, will help you make an informed decision.
Read MoreToday, I’m going to show you how to use custom transformations in AWS Glue Studio! This will help smooth out the bumps of AWS Glue Studio by using custom coding – with Python!
Read MoreRoutine Cognos server maintenance is critical in order to ensure your environment performs optimally and remains reliable. Failure to attend to this could likely cause unnecessary downtime and impact critical deadlines. Similar to maintaining a vintage car – all it requires is some shrewd TLC. In this article, I review some key checks to assist in maintaining your Cognos Analytics servers.
Read MoreOnce you have started honing your report authoring skills in Cognos Analytics, you may want to take the next step in your authoring… and customizing the output using Conditional Formatting is one of the ways you can do this. As implied by its name, Conditional Formatting allows the user to apply formatting only when a certain condition is met.
Read MoreTo figure out which version of Cognos Analytics you’re on, you can simply use the UI to get an initial understanding. Click the Personal Menu in the top right, then choose About. To find out deeper information, you can use the cmplst.txt file in your install.
Read MoreKai Ming, a non-profit agency providing comprehensive early care and education services for underprivileged children, and PMsquare, a data analytics technology and consulting firm, are excited to announce that the PMsquare Children’s Center has officially opened its doors on May 13th in Mission Bay, San Francisco.
Read MoreInstalling Cognos takes time. The more complex the environment, the more time it takes. The time spent running the Cognos installer is compounded by the number of environments that need to be created. Fortunately, there are options on AWS to help Cognos administrators get out of the business of waiting for the install to complete. The two options we will be exploring here are EC2 user data and custom AMIs.
Read MoreJust the other day, I was wrangling with a DIY challenge and spent hours trying to make a scattering of suboptimal tools I had work when a short run to the hardware store would have solved all my problems in minutes. In much the same way in analytics consulting, I see my clients sometimes struggling to find the right service for their challenges of the near and long term. In this piece, I’ll share an overview of two seemingly similar service options and discern the right time to engage for each.
Read MoreOne of the most common questions I've heard as I build my extensions is "How can I hide them from my users?". Ensuring users can only see, and interact with, only the features necessary for their job is of paramount importance. Cognos is certainly a confusing tool to the untrained with a huge range of features. Let’s figure out how to control your UI elements.
Read MoreRunning workloads in the cloud is on everyone’s radar these days. Whether a company is already deployed on the cloud, actively migrating to the cloud, or just thinking about it. For many companies, taking advantage of the scale and the services that public clouds provide is becoming a critical piece of their infrastructure. However, these platforms are large and often complicated for companies looking at them for the first time.
Read MoreData capture and the subsequent reporting were not easy for Kai Ming. Separate local, state, and federal agencies plus private donors and sponsors support Kai Ming. Monthly government-mandated reporting is necessary to maintain funding. Kai Ming’s Governing Board and Parent Council require different formats and content. Furthermore, Dr. Yang needed a comprehensive view of the program, from overall operations to classroom-level analytics and individual family and child records. With the help of PMsquare, Kai-Ming solved its challenges using Cognos.
Read MoreI've been in several situations where a client is hesitant to use a Data Set because of the lack of row-level security. While IBM doesn't provide the same data security functionality for Data Sets and uploaded files, you can easily include row-level security using the queryValue macro function. Let's step through how to do it using an example use case.
Read MoreAs you’ve likely heard by now, there has recently been an extremely critical vulnerability identified in Apache Log4j. As you may also be aware, Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics both make use of Log4j (as do a myriad of other enterprise software products). Take action to mitigate problems and stay updated.
Read MoreWith the inevitable, ever-tighter AI integration and infusion with IBM’s products, analytics practitioners need to understand the AI pillars and explainability principles that IBM espouses. These principles should be understood by CA and PA developers, administrators, and product owners, as they will inform the future direction of the AI components of each core product. Most importantly, it will be necessary for doers in our space to use the explainability toolkit in order to explain why models (and integrated, downstream components) predict/project/suggest/decide what they do to our business partners.
Read MoreSo, 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!
Read MoreIBM 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreScheduled 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.
Read MoreAn 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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