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.
Read MoreWe’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.
Read MoreDeploying 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.
Read MoreDo 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.
Read MoreAt 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!
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreSo, you have been granted access to your company’s Cognos Analytics application, and you are eager to create your first report, but not really sure where to start, or how to get to the point that your report is answering the questions you are hoping to answer. Hopefully, this article will help you achieve your desired results, or at least get you a good start towards that goal. Let’s get started!
Read MoreBusiness Intelligence tools have changed rapidly over the last few years with many vendors pushing out multiple updates each year – some even quarterly. It has become difficult to keep track of the myriad changes to the tools as each release brings them functionally closer to each other. So, we’ve created a matrix to help!
Read MorePMsquare is proud to announce the formation of our new Cloud Data Delivery business unit. Cloud Data Delivery brings together decades of experience solving data pipeline, data warehousing, and business intelligence challenges from across the organization into a single entity focused on delivering cloud-first data solutions and migrating existing on-prem data warehouse and BI workloads to the cloud.
Read MoreHave you ever thought it would be nice to be able to add or update some piece of data and have it reflected in your Cognos Analytics Dashboard and/or Reports? Well, now you can, with the IBM TM1 REST API and some Cognos Analytics Custom Controls! The IBM TM1 REST API allows you to create, read, update, and delete TM1 data, as well as interact with your TM1 Server in other ways (that’s a different article).
Read MoreWe’re pleased as punch to announce a brand new release of the CogBox from the mind of Cognos Paul. CogBox is the world’s premier Cognos productivity and customization extension designed to make your life easier. It includes productivity and usability enhancements as well as a library of custom controls and visualizations. Let’s dive into what you can expect in this release!
Read MoreThe Progress DataDirect Autonomous REST connector included with Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 cannot yet autonomously handle the unconventional JSON that the US Census Bureau sends it. We were hoping that Progress would be able to include the enhancement with Cognos Analytics Fix Pack 2 (released just a few weeks ago), but that’s not the case. In the meantime, here are some manual workaround options to enable use of US Census Bureau data in your Cognos Analytics environments.
Read MoreThe vision was to combine our global organizational reach (offices in: US, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India) with our proven methodology to create a repeatable and scalable support arm for our customers’ unique needs. Over the course of the last 3 years, we have implemented and hardened processes to seamlessly coordinate across our global team and deliver value to our customers. Over that time, we have expanded our supported technologies significantly as well, to the point where we now can support many front-end BI tools, major cloud providers, and data pipeline applications.
Read MoreThe 2020 US elections. Emergency responses to the ever-expanding hurricane and wildfire seasons. The COVID-19 pandemic. What do these newsworthy and oft-visualized subject areas all have in common? Integrated US Census Bureau data. The demographic, economic, housing, and social data collected from Census Bureau surveys and programs are often intertwined with other data to provide context. Knowing how to integrate this public data with your own is a skill worth honing.
Read MoreOne of the great features of the Bag o' Tricks section of CogBox is a control creator. This can be used to create template report objects, like custom controls. What's awesome about this, is that not only does this offer a place for PMsquare's controls, you can also use it to host your own.
Read MoreIn prior versions of Cognos (Version 7, ReportNet and Cognos 10) there were tools for quickly slicing and dicing a PowerCube. These tools are no longer part of the Cognos toolset in version 11.1.n so there may be some users missing this capability and would desire it would be still available. While not exactly the same, this functionality persists in the Reporting application portion of Cognos Analytics. This article will help users understand how to use Reporting to replicate the features they miss from PowerPlay and Analysis Studio.
Read MoreIf you are looking to branch out into data science, Cognos can help you! Starting with release 11.1.2, IBM is including Jupyter Notebook Server with Cognos Analytics. Jupyter notebooks are a popular way to analyze data and visualize the results in a browser, but their real power is the ability to share these notebooks with other data scientists who can interact with the data in real-time.
Read MoreBack in October of 2019, we introduced Incorta to our customers as an emerging technology to not only modernize our customer’s data and analytics estates but also to analyze their most complex data, quickly. Whether you are using Incorta for a pure speed solution or exposing Incorta modeling via Cognos to take advantage of existing enterprise reporting infrastructure, you can take advantage of Incorta and Cognos modeling tools to deliver the best result.
Read MoreAs a consultant, I usually scan it quickly for relevant information and then send it to my favorite Outlook folder - Deleted Items. But what if you’re in charge of a BI environment at a company? Should you be concerned about these security vulnerabilities? And if you’re new to the game how do you even find which bulletins apply to your Cognos version or environment? Maybe you didn’t even know there were security bulletins! I’ll try to break it down.
Read MoreWhile previously it's been possible to bring weather data into Cognos Analytics with some coding via a set of APIs, in Cognos Analytics 11.1.4 The Weather Company was added as a data source, making the process simpler and native to Cognos. Let’s explore how that connection works and look at a simple example of how to visualize Weather company data.
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