1. Cognos Higher Education Users Conference - Southwest Region
Birds of a Feather Breakout Session
Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment
Julian Hooker, Assistant Managing Director, Information Systems,
Texas Tech University System
Edgar Luna, Enterprise B.I. Specialist, Enterprise Computing,
University of Texas, El Paso
Eddie Smalley

2. Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment
Agenda
Background
General and Server Side
Questions
Reporting, Packages and Cubes
Security
Discussion

3. Background
Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

4. Background – TTUS Went live with Cognos in 2008
Part of our ERP implementation of SGHE Banner
Julian is the Cognos Environment Manager and Reporting Leader
Julian’s area does not write production reports
Server administration is centralized, but report writing is decentralized
Texas Tech is three institutions, Texas Tech University, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and Texas Tech University System. There are functional areas in each.

5. Background - TTUS TTU Office of Research TTUHSC Human Resources AFISM
Housing
Institution Research
TTUHSC IT
Other
TTUS IS,
Julian Hooker
TTU IT
Budget
TTUHSC Financial Aid
TTUHSC Student
TTU Human Resources
TTUHSC Business Affairs
TTU Enrollment Management

6. Background - TTUS Licensing
24 BI Administrator (Framework Manager/Report Studio/Transformer)
56 BI Business Authors (Reports Studio)
2500 Concurrent users of Analysis Studio, Query Studio, and Event Studio

7. Background TTUS Architecture Environments Dev (virtual) Test (virtual)
User Interfaces
Web server
Applications Servers
6 Dispatchers and Content Manager
Oracle 10g Database Server
Architecture
Environments
Dev (virtual)
Test (virtual)
Prod (physical)

8. Background - UTEP
Cognos started as Vice President Business Affairs Office project in 2007.
Cognos Components:
Framework Manager
Transformer
Query, Report, Analysis and Metric Studio
Administration is Centralized
Reporting Team Administrate all areas

9. Background - UTEP Architecture Environments Dev Test Prod
User Interfaces
Web server
Applications Servers
2 Dispatchers and Content Manager
Oracle 10g Database Server

10. Background - UTEP Live areas: Payroll Financial Reporting
Contracts and Grants
Budget HR
College Administrators Officers
Currently working with all the academic areas.

11. Background - IBM Architecture Design Health assessment
Installation perspective.  
No report writing or framework manager work

12. General and Server Side
Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

13. General and Server Side
After Go-live in June 2008
Occasional system slowness
Occasional unscheduled downtime
Slow report performance
Learning load cycles
When is the busiest time for the Cognos servers?
Busy time for Texas Tech is the Budget Prep time and not end of fiscal year/beginning of fall semester

14. General and Server Side
Consulting with experts
Cognos server health check summer 2008
Cognos server health check summer 2009
Sungard examination of the TTU Finance reporting environment 2009
Cognos reporting expert 2010

15. General and Server Side
Cognos Server Health Check
Focus on server side settings
Tweaks in configuration or correcting server side library versions
Health check can greatly help stability
Server side changes do not help report performance by large margins

16. General and Server Side
Budget Prep 2009, our first real test
We were using a current version of Cognos
Very slow response time in reports
Reports timing out of the Report service queue
Learned how to review errors in the logs
Developed methods for sorting through the volumes of data in the log
Using the logs and the Cognos KB to solve problems
Learned how to monitor the server
Tweaked the number of Report Service Processes
Affected server stability

17. General and Server Side
Next Steps
Additional hardware
Increase the number of Report Service processes
Server Health Check
Found about a dozen item which were mostly minor
Reduced Report Service processes
Created dedicated batch servers
Separated batch servers from Content Manager servers to deal with I/O issues
Concurrent Query Execution

18. General and Server Side
Ongoing
Daily error report
Server monitoring
IP and free disk space
Issue tracking
Load testing
Reporting Tools
Most Intensive Cognos Reports Report
Audit Database
Logs

19. General and Server Side
Preparation for Budget Prep 2010
Focused on the reporting side
Looked in Audit Database to gather statistics from the previous year
Framework Manage change to minimize records in the database.
Database optimization

20. General and Server Side
Further changes
Upgraded to the most current version of Cognos
Went all 64 bit
Note on upgrades
TTUS’s upgrades have been pretty smooth

21. Questions

22. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

23. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Report performance
Reports run perfect the first year, what happen the following years?
Student Faculty Evaluation experience.

24. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Report performance
Prompts: The larger the number of queries the longer it takes to process the prompt page.
Options:
Split the prompts using multiple prompt pages.
If you have a pick list prompt with 10,000 entries use Select and search prompts.

25. Reporting Packages and Cubes
performance

26. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Report performance
Prompts: The larger the number of queries the longer it takes to process the prompt page.
Options:
Understand your customers needs you may use Statics choices instead.

27. Reporting Packages and Cubes
performance

28. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Report performance
Prompts: The larger the number of queries the longer it takes to process the prompt page.
Remember: The data display by a prompt control (Ex. Value prompt) will be truncated at rows.

29. Reporting Packages and Cubes
You report may run with warnings and errors… until….
Always validate Always
Always take care of warnings

30. Reporting Packages and Cubes
You have created 100 reports, What if…
Back up Reports
Save a copy to notepad file.
Note: This also helps if you
need to move reports
between environments.

31. Reporting Packages and Cubes
How to maintain packages and cubes
Only one version in common storage
Packages
Publish VS Export / Import
Cubes
Automate Update Cube process
Monitor cube update process (Duration)

32. Reporting Packages and Cubes
Ms-Dos Batch Content:
echo Creating cube %date% %time%
"D:\cognos\c8\bin\cogtr.exe" –n "D:\Cognos_Data\Cubes\MFR-cube\RecreateMFRcube.mdl"
Mdl file content:
EventStart "Build MFR Cube"
OpenPY "D:\Cognos_Data\Cubes\MFR-cube\MFR Cube.pyj"
SignonUpdate "COGDATA" PromptforPassword False UserID "user_id" Password "password"
savePY "D:\Cognos_Data\Cubes\MFR-cube\MFR Cube.pyj"
EventEnd

33. Questions

34. Security
Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

35. Security - TTUS Decentralized security administration
With a combination of groups, capabilities, and permissions, end users can maintain their own security groups
Some end users get it and some do not
Sync groups using the SDK
Nightly batch jobs

36. Security - UTEP How to maintain Security No concurrent licenses
Create new groups
Grant Access
Cognos roles and groups
New groups
Exchange Groups

37. Security - UTEP Your Friend Audit DB. Statistics License Monitoring
Users no longer employees

38. Security - UTEP How to know the users membership. SDK Applications
Content Data base
cmreford1
cmobjprops1
cmobjprops33

39. Questions

40. Discussion Additional Topics Upgrades Change management
Getting IT and business areas to talk
Cognos roles

41. Thank You Julian Hooker Edgar Luna Julian.Hooker@ttu.edu