Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

December 13, 2017 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

This blog article is the first in a series of articles on this subject. It’s not something that has been explored in depth to our knowledge and deserves move coverage. Our focus will be on the breadth and depth of Cognos metadata, and more importantly, how it can be used to address issues that Cognos administrators and developers face on a daily basis. These will be in depth examples of Cognos Metadata and its use.

September 29, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

In reality the value is only hidden from those who cannot easily see it. It’s more waiting to be discovered than hidden.

This is something we began to explore with our customers. It started more than a couple of years ago when we began to create Custom Queries for our customers. These were specific, often detailed requests for information about objects and relationships in their Content Store. In many cases these were things we had never thought about previously. And while our NetVisn product has broad reporting and analytics, some of the requests we’ve gotten from customers go well beyond basic questions on content.

June 28, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

In Part I of this blog we covered the basics of data lineage; its definition and why it’s important. Here in Part II our will be focus on some of the things that are possible when Cognos data lineage is captured and stored for use in multiple creative ways.

May 23, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

This blog focuses on Part I of the subject of Data Lineage, covering what it is and why it’s important. A Part II blog will follow this and focus on creative possibilities for using data lineage in multiple ways once you’ve broken the code.

What is it?

Simply stated, data lineage describes the data’s origins, where it moves and what happens to it over time. In some environments there are specific requirements for the data lineage and its provenance. This is often the case with financial institutions that have to satisfy regulatory requirements relating to data used for investment purposes.

March 31, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

If you’re a Cognos administrator there’s lots of key information you just need to have access to, especially in the area of security. Here we’re going to focus on what some consider among the top needs. These are:

• Groups, Roles, Memberships and Members
• Security profile of a role, group or account
• Inherited security
• Object security
• User permissions - licensing

January 31, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Perhaps the greatest undervalued asset within Cognos Analytics is the audit data that gets generated for virtually everything that happens inside the application. In its native form it’s all but unusable for anything except rudimentary analysis. We’ve covered this subject in great detail in our Ebook, Expert Guide to Cognos Audit Data. Writing this prompted us to challenge the thinking that there’s only so much that you can do with this data as it comes from Cognos.

What if you could use your audit data for anything you wanted to?

January 5, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

With Watson having become the point of the IBM marketing spear an obvious question being raised by many Cognos administrators is how one relates to the other. Our focus here is on that audience primarily because there is a perception of an overlap between the two, and if there is, what is the extent of the overlap? Here we’ll try to address both questions.

September 8, 2016 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Our recent blogs on Cognos audit data have focused on getting it to where it can be used easily for anything you want to use it for. Once it’s been normalized this assumes that the data are consistent and capture everything within Cognos. Unfortunately this isn’t always true. So how do we address this?

By Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In our previous blog article, Creating a Framework Manager (FM) Model for Cognos Audit Data, we talked about work that we’ve recently done to create dynamically modeled relational data in the form of a FM Model. Our intent was to capture all available audit data and align it along key data dimensions and couple it with reference data from the actual Cognos environment. Doing this required at least a couple iterations. As we started to actually use the data to create the vision we wanted of UniVisn being reflective of a real world Cognos environment we needed to tweak some things like relative time periods, object type dimensions and status and sources.

By Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

Our recently published eBook, Expert Guide to Cognos Audit Data focuses on sharing our knowledge on this subject while showing readers many of the possible uses for audit data. Based on feedback we received and our own ruminations, we took on the challenge of how we could take everything we know about Cognos audit data and use it in a way that maximizes what can be done with it using IBM Cognos’ latest technology.