IBM Cognos Reviews

FM – though it lacks some of the previous version's features: dimensional and sorting.

We're thinking about a different product.

There are a number of things, but I would start with just a few...

Framework Manager:

1. Query subjects sorting in a model are absent.
2. DMR model in FM is currently decommissioned, but basically needed.
3. Cubes – requires my time to explain, but cannot work properly with a big dimensions.

I've used this solution for three years.

Yes.

Yes.

Bad.

Not applicable.

Some issues, though not many.

Not matching the product quality.

Started working with what was used by the organization.

If you choose a Cognos product, be aware to wait until at least the second or third fixpack appears.

There are several valuable features of Cognos. In this review, I will be concentrate more on the Automating Cube Building and Deployment without any manual intervention.. even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'.

IBM Cognos Transformer cubes are one of the widely used OLAP data sources. Normally, a PowerCube contains calculated and aggregated data that is organized as dimensions and measures, which can be viewed and analyzed in Analysis Studio and Report Studio (versions 10). Users find it easy to use and quick to access aggregated summary data which help in better analysis. IBM Cognos PowerCube data is static, and building a PowerCube naturally becomes a repetitive process. At my work place, cube data is refreshed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Since the data volume and the number of dimensions and measures in the cube are big, the build process takes 3-4 hours to complete. In order to ensure the most benefit from the cube, having a scheduled and automated cube build is essential.

Deployment and Activation a new feature which was introduced in version 8.4 that allows the cube file to be automatically copied over to a specified local or network location, activated and/or archived depending on the requirements.

Basically one needs to set the Deploy properties on the .mdl file using Transformer.

– Deployment Strategy: select the “Copy to available locations, then activate” option. This will copy the cube .mdc file to target server location.

– After building the cube: select “Automatically copy and active”.

– Deployment location: add a path for production and/or a place that .mdc file should be deployed too. You can select multiple locations. For instance, the same cube may be deployed to both the Development and Production servers.

– Check “Enable automatic PowerCubes deletion”

Once the changes are made, we need to use the Cognos Transformer command line is capable of performing certain modeling and cube-building tasks on the Windows, UNIX or Linux platforms.

The general syntax for using windows command line is as follows:

cogtr -n -lcognostr10=

Notice that after the cube build completes, Transformer automatically deploys and activates the newly generated cube. It doesn’t require any changes to the data source connection. The live cube swap is effective immediately.

Just a few more steps (on Windows environment), you can now schedule the cube build via a job scheduler application, such as Windows Scheduled Tasks. Here once the ETL process is complete, a Flag file would be sent to Transformer box to trigger the cube builds. You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule.

- Need improvement towards Visualization.

I've used Cognos in some form or the other past 10+ years

Yes, since we were implementing VB Script batch file process on the Transformer server. We had to do some testing to ensure success. Later worked like a charm.

Cognos is extremely stable... Unless someone develops and tries to run a huge data set.. Its all about educating users.

No

Customer Service is good and quick answering.

Yes, Technical Support is very good to some extent.. They would try the initial knowledgebase solutions ( which we would have already tried) .. but they do work along with us to solve issues... sometimes it is quick, some time it takes time reproducing the issue and solving..

Always been using different versions of Cognos - right from the Impromptu.

It was a mix of both.

In-house. I have implemented most of the solution specific to user requirements.. One of them is the automate cube build and deployment.

Cognos Analytics, or CA for short, is an enterprise level reporting platform. At the most basic level you can use it to build reports. But taking a broader look allows you to see that it covers a vast amount of ground through many different modules.

The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools.

Framework Manager allows you to build relationships between physical database tables, and even a ROLAP solution. Great for detailed or minor aggregation.

Transformer is a basic cube modeling software. Best for building dimensional models over smaller datasets (a few dozen GB), it works extremely well.
Dynamic Cubes is a more advanced ROLAP solution that has intelligent aggregate, query, data, and result set caching. In my experience this works best with larger data, in the TB or PB ranges.

Data Modules. This is an advanced user level modelling. It allows end users to build and cache datasets which they can then use in ad-hoc dashboards and reports.

On the reporting side it, again, has a few tools.

Report Studio is the professional reporting environment. This allows BI Developers to create advanced reports, dashboards, analytical applications. While it does take some training, the effort is well worth it.

Dashboards work against the data modules. T allows advanced users to work with the data modules they've built previously to build dashboards. Users can quickly drag in fields directly onto the canvas to make graphs, prompts, data grids. Interactivity is automatically defined (but can be defined manually) to allow users to filter one group of objects by clicking on another.

Story is a tool used to create presentations. You can use elements from other reports to make a slide show or "guided journey".

There are a few other tools, like Event Studio which can be set to automatically perform actions based on query outputs. There is a graph building tool that allows you to build graphs that developers can use in their reports.

As a consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with a very wide range of clients with very specific needs. So far, Cognos has not failed to meet their needs, and surpass their expectations. The beautiful thing about Cognos is its flexibility.

One client, a government research organization, uses the tool to track specific incidents. When certain criteria occur, specific reports should be emailed. An SMS should be delivered. The researchers needed to be able to view the incidents from as many different perspectives as possible, and quickly go from one perspective to another without losing the context. Dynamic filtering and linking prevailed here.

Another client wanted to expose Cognos to the general public, embedding report outputs in their own portal system. This required a heavy security presence, with redundant levels of data and object security. Even if a report developer did leave a hole in the report, malicious end-users would never be able to get any data they weren't permitted to see. Cognos withstood the probing of professional pen-testers with admirable results.

As with all products, I have run into bugs; some severe enough to derail the project until IBM provided a patch. IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner. Fortunately, show-stopping bugs are few and far between.

I have worked with IBM Cognos for many years, across several different product versions. The most recent being IBM Cognos Analytics 11.6.

Cognos presents interesting scaling opportunities. Additional servers can be loaded and unloaded as needed, and there are many ways of routing report runs. For larger organizations, it's possible to optimize report runs by having one branch of an organization always run reports from a single server.

Support is not cheap, and consultants (hello!) generally charge a few appendages. This is, of course, a matter of getting what you pay for.

The best piece of advice I can give to companies considering Cognos is to factor in the cost of training or consultants. Cognos, despite what some sales people may say, is not an easy tool to start with. It requires a hefty amount of investment to implement. But with proper training, and working with the tool's strengths, the return is well worth the price.

The jobstreams and the ways SQL-scripts can be effectively organized behind icons.

• It gave the organization a better insight in the quality of the data, which in many ways was poor.
• It gave the call center the possibility to monitor its effectiveness and efficiency a lot better.

• The Cognos Data Manager is very datamart/Kimball oriented, and it should be made more flexible, so that it can be used for architectures like Inmon’s or a data vault.
• Some of its components are not very stable (for instance the lookups).
• The prescribed working order (dimensions and hierarchies, then fact-tables) makes implementing design adaptations a complex and risky operation: loosen one thread, and a lot more go with it, and this should me made more flexible.

I've used it roughly for more than a year.

The stability of the Cognos Data Manager is quite good. It doesn’t crash very often, but of course making daily backups of your work is a wise thing to do, as with any tool.

No issues encountered.

We only had a company provide digital training. Their communication was poor, and they worked with a call center which was totally uneffective.

I had to make do with what could be found on websites and the internet. The information IBM gives here is solid, but very technical and hard to read. Other websites have to be handled with care as many contributions are more enthusiastic then useful.

I started using Cognos Data Manager because the company I worked for already used it.

To start with SSIS:

• SSIS is a lot more flexible than the Cognos Data Manager. In the latter, the user is pushed into the direction of a Kimball datamart architecture (data marts, which in a later stage are to be integrated into a integrated solution). SSIS leaves a lot more room to the user to make his or her own decisions (and suffer the consequences of these)
• The user interface is a lot more user friendly in SSIS, while Cognos Data Manager is somewhat outdated (but can in capable hands still be used very effectively)

In comparison with large scripts in Oracle and SQL Server:

• The Cognos Data Manager provides a comparison of large scripts for a real and substantial improvement. The icons and jobstreams provide a lot of structure, and are a lot easier to read and interpret than large scripts which can be hundreds of pages long
• Functions like lookups are very nice, but not always enterily stable (which is a serious drawback in their use)
• Combining Oracle and SQL Server databases with each other is a definite strong point of the Cognos Data Manager (although no longer a unique selling point)
• The SQL-scripts are pasted behind the icons. It makes tracing errors and the logic of processes a lot easier

It had already been installed, and I got a lot of support from other people in the company. I have no experience with a vendor team.

The company I worked for got a better understanding of its poor data quality, and many inefficiences in its operations. But in their mindset, speed is everything, and precision is often regarded as something of a luxury. They got more insights, made a lot of noise about it, but made no structural efforts for improvement.

• Consider carefully if you want a Kimball architecture with datamarts for your datawarehouse. If so, the Cognos Data Manager is a good option. If not, I think you should reconsider
• Consider what exactly you want to achieve with your datawarehouse. For having a historical database, it can be quite effective. For daily control, in most cases a datawarehouse architecture is unsuitable and unwieldy. Direct reports on source systems are than a better option
• If your organisation has issues with data qualities, a datawarehouse won’t solve these. It can only make these visible (and there are probably a lot of cheaper ways to do that)

• The solution is very flexible, but IT oriented.
• It is an enterprise level solution for BI that holds value in a traditional BI sense.
• It is a full platform that is designed for the full cycle (data warehousing to pixel perfect reporting).
• It provides a managed IT environment.
• It does not excel in any one specific area, such as in visualization. However, there appears to be a lot of development with complementary products such as Watson Analytics and TM1.

We have been able to provide managed data sources and packages to end users. They can use this content to do their own reporting without IT assistance.

It is similar to a competency center, in which IT will help resolve or work on complex requirements or projects.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Tools: Dashboards, visualizations, and the simplification of the available tools
• Licensing: It is very difficult to know which studio needs to be passed to which users or projects. This is because licensing and tools are confusing and they overlap with one another. Even for OLAP, there are issues with transformers, TM1, dynamic cubes, and compatibility with other vendors’ cubes.
• Simplicity: There are CQM and DQM modes, so it can become very technical.
• Consistency: They made a decision to deprecate Query Studio and migrate to Workspace Advanced. However, that did not happen. They wanted to push the new version which will deprecate Workspace Advanced as well.

Basically, Cognos has been a traditional BI platform. Lately, there has been a trending push for more of a modern BI approach that is heavier on the self service side. This approach does not care for the whole cycle of waiting on a request to go through the IT development chain in order to make it happen for the end user.

I have used it for about nine years. My company has been using it for about six years.

We are on Linux, so we rarely have stability issues. We could run into resource issues, but that would be space or hardware related.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. Cognos is very good at scaling.

Vendor technical support could be improved. It used to be really great. However, it seems like the focus now is on newer development. The support may not be that good for the more difficult issues.

When I came here, they did not have another solution. In my past environment, they had Business Objects, but ended up switching to Cognos for the flexibility it provides.

If you are doing a standalone installation, then the initial setup is easy.

However, if you get into a distributed environment and load balancing, then it requires you to really know the application well. You need to know about the server level for all of the configurations.

Licensing has been simplified over the years. However, we do not like their Processor Value Unit (PVU) model and prefer the named user licensing route.

Pricing can be expensive depending on the number of administrators or developers. Regular consumer licenses do not cost as much. They also have a cloud solution.

If implementing on-site, you will need to have skilled administrators and developers who are experienced with this solution. They are in demand, so they will command a high salary.

Reporting, which includes building reports out of relational schema.

This product has made enhancements in building dashboards, incorporated changes to make it easier for the business users to import and use their metadata to do analysis. That is included in Cognos Analytics version 11. It is more user friendly and in some areas, you do not necessarily depend upon IT to build reports. There is one tool like Cognos Workspace Advanced, which is the hybrid of Query, Report and Analysis Studio.

Dashboarding: Actually right now in Cognos 10.2.2, Cognos Workspace is the dashboarding studio to build dashboards. But I believe some work still needs to be done in order to compete with other tools like Tableau, etc.

Tableau has in-memory capabilities and a lot of depth in visualizations. It can analyze and display a lot of intuitive data quicker. Also, Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau. However, the new version, Cognos 11, is a big step in that direction to make it more user friendly.

Dimensional Modeling Reporting: Dimensional Modeling is used for reporting where the reports can be drilled down to a detail level. It works on the same concept as cubes, except it is live. Performance is a big factor, so it requires lot of expertise to build the right kind of model with the proper aggregation level; otherwise, the performance is impacted. Plus, it requires MDX knowledge to enhance/maintain the model, because SQL doesn’t work in dimensional modeling.

I have used it for eight years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I encountered scalability issues when different users are querying at the same time or if one user is running a big report involving large query (SQL).

Technical support is 8/10.

Pricing and licensing is high. It can be lowered.

I didn't make the decision to choose this product.

It is a good product for reporting, not necessarily for dashboards.

The ability to interface with multiple server types (databases) to retrieve data and report on that data in an all-inclusive environment is beyond a doubt the best feature. The reporting interface takes getting used to, but once you familiarize yourself with it, you can create some truly amazing graphical and informational reports.

BI has allowed our product to become open ended as far as the client data is concerned. We have proprietary reporting that is standardized but doesn’t capture everything. BI expands that functionality to include any and all customization a client may have and still get their data.

The GUI for reporting isn’t very user friendly, so beginners struggle with feeling overwhelmed when seeing it for the first few times. I spent my first two years just getting used to where everything was and how to script simple things without looking them up. A better dictionary of examples for functions would have gone a long way with helping me.

They’ve improved it and it’s much better than it was, as well as the tooltips on the page, so I’m thinking they had similar feedback in the past. When I engage new clients on the product, though, they are almost always overwhelmed by the interface and I don’t have a good solution other than redesign. They could create a secondary Page Design pane that is simpler for beginners. They could even merge Query Studio with Report Studio, and as you familiarize yourself with the Query pane and need a little more functionality, you can flip to the Report Studio pane. I would prefer a secondary pane option over an entire redesign since I’m familiar with the current structure.

I’ve used Cognos BI for over seven years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I personally have had no problems with IBM tech support, though my experience is from a reporting standpoint not an implementation standpoint.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The only advice I can give here is that there are several third-party companies that will handle implementation as well as provide continued support post-production. I recommend doing your homework and hiring one of them to take care of implementation and support, if you don’t have a dedicated team to do so internally.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

There is a huge cost up front to purchase and get it off the ground, but once you have it, you won’t regret it. To have access to all of your data at your fingertips is impressive and I think it’s a must have for medium and large companies (+500 employees).

Reporting and dashboard capabilities are the product’s most valuable features.

It provides enterprise-level reporting across all departments.

ETL features have room for improvement.

I have used it for nine years.

When we have more than 1000 users logged in to the system, we can see slowdown in terms of performance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. We have always used IBM Cognos product suites.

Initial setup was pretty much straightforward.

We certainly looked at other BI products such as SAP BusinessObjects, OBIEE, Oracle Discoverer, WebFOCUS, Argos, and MicroStrategy but Cognos was our unanimous choice.