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

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

Background Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

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.

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

General and Server Side Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions

Reporting Packages and Cubes Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

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

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.

Reporting Packages and Cubes performance

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.

Reporting Packages and Cubes performance

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 5000 rows.

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

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.

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)

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

Questions

Security Administration Opportunities in an Established Cognos Environment

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

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

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

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

Questions

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

Thank You Julian Hooker Edgar Luna Julian.Hooker@ttu.edu edgar@utep.edu