What is IBM Cognos Business Intelligence?

IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence is an integrated business intelligence suite that provides a wide range of functionality to help users understand their organization's data. Everyone in an organization can use IBM Cognos BI to view or create business reports, analyze data, and monitor events and metrics so that they can make effective business decisions.

The web-based IBM Cognos architecture was designed for scalability, availability, and openness. It uses platform independent, industry proven technology, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Web Services Definition Language (WSDL).

The IBM Cognos architecture is based on a typical three-tiered web architecture that consists of the following components:

• a web server: The IBM Cognos web server tier contains one or more IBM Cognos gateways.

• applications: The IBM Cognos applications tier contains one or more IBM Cognos servers. An IBM Cognos server runs requests, such as reports, analyses, and queries, that are forwarded by a gateway.

• data: The IBM Cognos data tier consists of the content store, data sources, and the metric store.

IBM Cognos components communicate with each other, and with any additional applications integrated with IBM Cognos, using the BI Bus API. The BI Bus API is an open, documented, SOAP API that supports WSDL, providing platform-independent access to all IBM Cognos functionality.

The IBM® Cognos® architecture includes a number of services for interacting with and managing runnable objects. A runnable object is an instance of a class that defines the actions performed by a service when a run request is received. The run request specifies the content store location of an object in IBM Cognos. For example, a report, job, or agent are examples of runnable objects that can be invoked interactively through a portal action or a client request, or by a scheduled event.

Each service shares a set of generic methods for running objects associated with the service. Users send requests directly to the appropriate service, based on the class of the object. For example, a request to run a report is sent to the report service while a request to run an agent is sent to the agent service. Individual services may provide additional methods to perform operations specific to the service. For example, the Content Manager service provides additional methods to move, copy, and rename objects in the content store.

To support this architecture, services execute tasks using a generalized asynchronous protocol. The protocol uses a consistent mechanism for passing parameters to standardize how tasks are executed. Classes and methods exist to support this consistent process of executing tasks.

Why Monitor IBM Cognos Business Intelligence?

If the services are unavailable or stop running suddenly, then, the user requests sent to those services may fail. This will eventually affect the generation of reports and hence the data in the reports may be outdated. To ensure that the services are available at all times and optimially processes the requests raised by the users, it is essential to monitor the services and proactively identify those services that are unavailable. For this purpose, eG Enterprise offers a dedicated IBM Cognos Business Intelligence monitoring model.