Cognos Open Mic Webcast : IBM Cognos BI Notification and Auditing

Answer

Content

Presentation

IBM Cognos Open Mic- Audit and Notification Store.pdf

Q & A

1. Is Cognos Audit and Cognos Audit Extensions are same?
A.They are different. Cognos Audit Extension provides more information, mostly about users in Namespace and their capabilities.

Cognos 10:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/development/utilities/page574.html

Cognos 8:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/development/utilities/page509.html

2. What is the impact on the performance by changing the logging level ?
A. Logging level Request, Trace and Full tends to write detailed info in the audit database and also the cogserver.log. As a result the cogserver.log file grows too fast and resources are required to dump a constant request/response of every activity on the server to the database.

Trace and Full are reserved for troubleshooting purposes only and should be enabled only under the direction of IBM Cognos Support.Request can be set but only to those services for which you would like to capture some more details.

3. We can get the report execution history for custom reports?
A. Audit store stores information for all the reports executed. So yes, you can get this information. There are predefined reports available with Cognos Audit package, which provides this information.

4. Is there any way to figure out which report didn't run at least once using Audit?
A. Using DS servlet you can identify such reports which were never run.
Information on DS servlet can be found at : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/page258.html

5. What if dispatcher and content manager are installed on different machines? what database will be notification database in that case?
A. If you have not created a notification store then the Content Manager machine is by default accessing your content store however since its a distributed environment and dispatcher is a separate installation , on every dispatcher(App Tier) machine you have to configure the notification store to point to the content store.

If the notification is another database, then on Content Manager and dispatcher both, you will have to configure the notification store.

6. a. I have Notification store same as content store. How can I separate now?
b. Should I delete the notification tables from my content store.
A. a. Create a new Notification store and configure your Content Manager and dispatcher to point to this new database.
b. It is not required, as once you have setup new notification, upon starting the Cognos Services, tables for notification databse will be generated in notification store and all the notification information will start getting logged into new database.

7. What is the major advantage of having notification store separately?
A. The traffic will get separated between two databases, notification database and Content Store database. Number of connections to the content store will be reduced.

8. When we execute the NC Script, it will recreate the tables in notification store but then how to get the data about schedules which are missing ? Do we have to recreate those schedules ?
A. NC drop script does not delete schedules. Hence when the tables are re-created, all the schedules will still be available.

9. Is there any recommendation over schema sizes for Audit and Notification stores?
A. No, there aren't any predefined schema size recommendations for these 2 stores.

10. Can we modify audit reports as per business reports?
A. Yes. You can modify the audit reports as per you wish adding or subtracting prompts, filters.

11. For Auditing, Is separate database required or separate schema can fullfill the requirement ?
A. Separate schema can be used, however make sure that when you take a backup it is taken on the schema level because in future if you have to restore the content store then the audit store should not be affected.