Cognos Analytics

MetaManager Health Check

Overview

Managing Cognos Analytics is a demanding, full-time responsibility. From overseeing various services and ensuring user security to managing licenses and monitoring performance, the tasks can seem endless. Moreover, limited access to crucial information can hinder your ability to see the complete picture. But there's good news—BSP MetaManager is here to assist. Here are some of the ways MetaManager can help you achieve your Cognos Analytics objectives:

Licenses and User Management

Let's face it, managing Cognos licenses can be a daunting task. With over 20 out-of-the-box roles and more than 50 capabilities, it's easy to either over-allocate or under-allocate licenses, and finding the correct set of roles and capabilities for each license type can be challenging.

MetaManager simplifies this process. It provides a comprehensive list of all licenses in use and allows you to drill down into the data to identify capabilities that might be inflating your license counts. Additionally, you can access valuable information such as the last login date, enabling you to potentially remove users who are not utilizing a named license.

CQM/DQM

The 64-bit Report Engine, commonly known as "Dynamic Query Mode" (DQM), has been available since the release of Cognos 10 in 2010. Surprisingly, many Cognos clients have yet to convert or are unsure if they are utilizing DQM.

With MetaManager, you can obtain a comprehensive inventory of all your packages and their CQM/DQM status. Additionally, you can access audit usage data for each package to determine if they are being used, how frequently, and the last time they were accessed.

Note: Audit Logging must been enabled to setup for historical reporting.

Data Sources

If you've been a long-time Cognos customer, chances are you've accumulated a significant number of data sources over the years. Alternatively, you might be inheriting an environment with limited documentation from a previous administrator. Navigating through each data source to identify its type or vendor can be incredibly time-consuming.

With BSP MetaManager, you can streamline this process. Simply connect to your desired environment and run a Data Source Canned report to obtain a comprehensive inventory of all existing data sources. This tool also helps you identify non-functional data sources, allowing you to focus on resolving or removing them.

To further simplify your tasks, MetaManager offers a dashboard that provides a visual overview of the data sources your systems are referencing.

Content Store Bloat

One of the primary causes of a sluggish Cognos environment is Content Store bloat. Over the years, saved outputs and uploaded files can accumulate, resulting in a large and slow database. Out-of-the-box tools often struggle to provide insights into this data, but MetaManager can help. It quickly reveals how much space is occupied by outputs, as well as the location and size of each file. With this information, you can efficiently identify and remove outdated or oversized files, improving your system's performance.

These are just a few of the ways that MetaManager can help you but we only scrated the surface of what the tool can do.  If you are interested in learning more about MetaManager or want to schedule a Health Check for your Cognos environment, we can help with that! If you are interested in BSP Services or extra help with your Congos tasks, let us know by emailing Nikki Malone, nmalone@microstrat.com.