Cognos 8 Platform

The IBM Cognos 8 platform gives IT administrators a streamlined way to deploy, manage and evolve their performance management applications.

With the Cognos 8 platform you can:

• Confidently deploy and predictably perform in complex environments
• Easily meet and exceed SLAs with the business
• Efficiently manage your system through change
• Effectively leverage and enhance existing security
• Jumpstart your deployment with a proven methodology

Confidently deploy and predictably perform in complex environments

The Cognos 8 platform lets you predict your system performance to minimize risks and plan accordingly for the capacity required when you deploy your solution.

• Peer-to-peer services: Deploy peer-to-peer services across the network without a single point of failure
• Automatic load balancing: Built-in round robin load balancing with self-aware, self-starting, self-spawning peer-to-peer services
• Proven linear scalability: Services can scale up or scale out for a predictable, linear response to workloads. Administrators can proactively reallocate resources when scaling the solutions.
• Completely Web-based deployment, including administration and authoring: Deploy and expand user communities across geographies, platforms or capability required.
• Simultaneous shipment on Windows, UNIX and Linux: Introduce new versions of the Cognos solution within heterogeneous environments as soon as they become available.

Meet and Exceed SLAs with the business

Get a complete view of system activity for administrators to take action before business impact

• Task-oriented system monitoring: Reduce the time and effort you need to monitor system activity, assess status and take appropriate actions. Administrators can view all system activity, from scheduled and interactive reports to servers and dispatchers, from a single location.
• Proactive administration: Detailed system metrics and custom thresholds reduce the time you need to troubleshoot, identify anomalies and resolve performance issues before they negatively impact system performance or the user experience.
• Integration with third-party EMS: Expose metrics within EMS solutions including IBM Tivoli.

Efficiently Manage the System through Change

Shorten the time you need to upgrade and minimize user disruptions.

• Visual upgrade manager: Streamline the upgrade process with the ability to visually compare report results between versions.
• Automated environment validation: Test, compare and record report results between environments to validate the impact of making changes to your solution.

Effectively leverage and enhance existing security

The Cognos 8 platform provides a comprehensive foundation to manage all aspects of your security, including authentication, access control, data-level security, application firewalls and encryption. Reduce the complexity, time and costs of administering and maintaining multiple security systems with best of breed security providers and in-place application security.

• Full support for LDAP, NTLM, Active Directory, Netegrity, SAP BW and Cognos Namespace
• Authentication: Pre-built integration with leading security providers; fully documented API for custom authentication.
• Access control: Centralized authorization and support for granular user access rights from within Cognos or a third-party security provider reduces the burden of managing multiple security schemes. IT can grant or deny permissions and track/audit usage for select users and groups.
• Data-level access rights: Simplify your security scheme with granular-level security for all objects and information including folders, subject areas, individual reports, portal pages, data connections and more.
• Application firewall: Prevent unauthorized access to performance management services. Application firewall monitors and interprets protocol traffic between services to help prevent hostile attacks and service interruption, and logs any denied traffic.
• Encryption: Protect data and transmissions with industry-standard encryption algorithms such as Triple DES and AES. The Cognos 8 platform features standard 56-bit encryption and enhanced encryption through third party providers such as Entrust.

Jump start your deployment

Deliver results more quickly using the IBM Cognos System Management Methodology, a proven and systematic approach consisting of:

• White papers containing proven practices for system administration (for example, System Auditing), complete with sample reports.
• Metadata models that accelerate your ability to administer your deployment.
• Tools to automatically establish performance thresholds in your specific environment.
• Sample administration models and reports, built using Cognos 8 BI, to help administrators understand performance trends and tune system performance.