Managing Cognos User Licenses - Part 2

As a Cognos Administrator, it's crucial to manage your Cognos licenses carefully. An audit can be both costly and time-consuming if you’re not in compliance. Unlike other tools that require license keys for activation, IBM Cognos Analytics relies on an "honor" system, meaning it’s your responsibility to ensure everything is properly managed and up-to-date.

There are numerous ways this situation can quickly spiral out of control.  In Part 1 of this series, we discussed Issue #1, Outside Roles and Capabilities

Issue #2 – Users Who Don’t Log In or Are No Longer with the Company

One of the most confusing aspects of Cognos Licensing is that changes to groups, roles, and capabilities don’t immediately affect your license counts. The counts are only updated when users log in with the new capabilities. For instance, if you accidentally add the “Everyone” role to the Analytics Administrator role, any users who log in during that time will count toward the Administrator license. Even if you later remove the “Everyone” role from the group, the license count won't be adjusted until those users log back in.

This issue usually resolves itself over time, but what if users don’t log in for weeks, months, or even a year? And what happens if users leave the company? Let’s examine each scenario in detail.

Users are no longer with the company.

This issue is quite common and easy to resolve. When a user logs into Cognos, a profile is created for them. This profile holds information about objects in "My Content," as well as capabilities and license information based on their last login. Whether you're part of a large organization with frequent staff changes or a smaller one, managing user profiles can be challenging when users leave.

The good news is that Cognos Administration includes a built-in tool called the Consistency Check. This tool scans your existing Cognos profiles and namespaces to identify and correct any mismatches.

For example, let’s say you have a user, Bill Loney, who is still appearing as an Admin in your license counts despite leaving the company in 2018, this user can be easily removed by using the Consistency Check tool. To streamline the process, you can schedule the Consistency Check to run weekly or monthly, depending on your needs. After running the check, be sure to refresh your license counts to see the updated numbers.

Users have not logged in recently.

A Consistency Check is effective when users have left the company and their accounts have been deleted from the namespace, such as Active Directory or LDAP. However, when users still have accounts that haven’t been deleted, or if active users haven’t logged in for several months or over a year, the situation becomes more complex. In these cases, manual steps are necessary to resolve the issues.

A common example of this scenario is when you hire a consultant for a project, granting them an admin license to complete their work. Once the project is finished, the consultant's account may be locked or disabled rather than deleted. In this case, a Consistency Check will still identify the account in your namespace, but it won't remove the profile from Cognos, meaning the account continues to occupy a valuable Admin license.

To resolve this, you’ll need to manually delete the consultant’s profile from Cognos to free up the license. Here’s how you can do that:

In the Cognos Admin Console, navigate to the namespace that contains the user’s account. From there, you can locate the specific account you want to delete.

Notice that users who have logged in appear as blue hyperlinks, with a date displayed on the right side. This indicates that they have an active profile and are counted toward a specific license type.

The quickest way to clean up a profile is to click the "More" button and then select “Delete this user’s profile” from the action list.

However, before proceeding with the deletion, it's important to be aware of the consequences:

1. Deleting a profile will remove any objects in the user’s “My Content” area. If there are valuable reports, make sure to copy them to a folder in the Team Content area first.

2. Any schedules linked to reports in My Content or scheduled by this user will become orphaned and will display as “Unknown” when you check the schedule properties.

You can choose to either review each user’s My Folders and schedules manually or utilize MetaManager to create a report that presents all this information in a straightforward format.

Almost all outputs in MetaManager can be filtered in various ways. To identify content owned by a specific user, I will run a Content Documenter. This will allow me to select the targeted user(s) and retrieve everything from Team Content and the Directory (All users’ My Content).

Please review the content owned by this user to determine if it is safe to delete their profile and content. Confirm whether any of the material should be retained before proceeding with the deletion.

After removing the necessary profiles, refresh your license counts and you should see the correct number of users assigned to each license type.

Users who haven’t logged in recently but have had their capabilities updated to either reduce or elevate their access.

These users are the most challenging to manage, as the only way to refresh the license counts is for them to authenticate by logging in. Once they log in, the license type and last login date will be updated, allowing you to refresh the license counts and confirm the correct amount.

 If you’re ready to quickly take control of your Cognos licenses, download MetaManager here: https://www.bspsoftware.com/products/metamanager/#mm-download

 If you’d like someone else to help you manage your Cognos licenses, we can help with that too!