Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

August 27, 2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

Previous blogs in this Cognos Metadata series focused capturing the metadata, the need to persist it and how to use it. Here we’ll be focusing on metadata drivers and how they are changing.

June 29, 2018, by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

One of the goals we set at the beginning of this blog series on Cognos metadata was to access all of it and to be able to use all of it to answer virtually any question anyone would ever have about their Cognos environment(s). In support of this it became almost inevitable that at some point we would be called to do this. Not just once, but multiple times.

February 28, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first couple of blogs in this subject series we covered the major elements of the Cognos metadata universe and how to harness them for use. And one of our goals was to be able to access metadata from any of the four major groups and be able to link when appropriate with data from any other group. This is possible because we have all of the metadata from the groups in an XML database which is a virtual image of the Cognos Content Store.

January 30, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first blog in this series published last month we presented the four key data groups in the Cognos Metadata Universe and described them in some detail. These are shown again on the left side of Figure 1 below. In that blog we also listed some of the things we would cover in subsequent blogs. One of these was the importance of having an architecture to deal with Cognos metadata.

Having a data architecture begins with the desired outcome of the process. Which is the answer to the question of how we want to use the data.

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.

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?

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

The term Big Data is used everywhere today but does it really apply to your Cognos Content Store? It depends on what you mean by Big Data. The consensus definition of Big Data actually is something like this:

By Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.
The Cognos Content Store holds some incredibly powerful information within it that can make life much easier for those charged with administering and supporting the Cognos environment. Some creative Cognos administrators have even managed to get Cognos to start reporting on itself.

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.
Cognos audit data tables remain essentially unchanged since the release of Cognos 8.4 a few years ago so any extension of value from the audit data has to come from using what’s already there more creatively. At Envisn we’ve found some ways to do this by using the Cognos Content Store as a reference data source for the audit data. In this blog we will review three use cases where this can be done to provide greater insight into your Cognos environment: