Building interactive visualizations with Cognos Dashboards

Use the Cognos Dashboards service to build interactive visualizations to explore, analyze, and present your data.

Required service
Cognos Dashboards
Data format
Tables in relational data sources

CSV files with comma (,) delimiter; Microsoft Excel .xls and .xlsx files.

For more information about supported data sources, see Supported data sources for Cognos Dashboards.

Cognos Dashboards provides a graphical canvas for a business user to investigate data for patterns and insights. The service includes a wide range of customizable visualization options to help you create interactive dashboards.

You don't need to understand coding or SQL to gain insights. To build a dashboard, drag data sources, visualizations, and widgets to the main canvas. You can also customize the appearance of the visualizations to make the data more visually appealing.

SuperStore sample dashboard with KPI, packed bubble, area, column, and pie visualizations

Set up Cognos Dashboards

  1. Set up Cognos Dashboards permissions.

    For more information, see Setting up Cognos Dashboards permissions.

  2. Set up the project that you are using to work with dashboards.

    For more information, see Before you start.

  3. Create a dashboard in your project.
    1. Click Assets to view a list of available assets for your project.
    2. From the Assets page, click New Assets.
    3. From the New asset page, go to the Graphical builders section, then click Dashboard editor.
    4. Follow the dialog prompts to create your new dashboard.

    For more information about how to create the dashboard, see Creating a dashboard.

  4. Migrate existing dashboards into your Cognos Dashboards environment.

    Cognos Dashboards runs a service that is different from the service that was running on Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.6 or earlier. However, you can migrate each dashboard to run on the current service.

    After you upgrade to the current version of Cloud Pak for Data and install the Cognos Dashboards service, open a dashboard to automatically migrate that dashboard to the current service.

    Restriction: You must have the Create dashboards permission and either the project Editor role or project Administrator role to migrate dashboards.

    If you have errors when migrating dashboards, refer to Troubleshooting.

Cognos Analytics dashboard features not supported in Cloud Pak for Data

Cognos Dashboards in Cloud Pak for Data does not have the following dashboard features that are normally available to Cognos Analytics dashboards:

  • Using Save as to create a copy of a dashboard, story, or template.
  • Users can open only one dashboard at a time.
  • Pinning content in one dashboard, then pasting the pinned content in another dashboard.
  • Adding a drill-through definition for one dashboard to another.
  • Resetting a dashboard.
  • Directly sharing assets from Microsoft Teams content through email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack.

    You can share the dashboard with other users by sharing the URL of the dashboard.

  • PDF printing of dashboards.
  • Using the Jupyter Notebook widget.
  • Creating and using custom widgets.
  • Using D3 and SVG custom visualizations.
  • Using the Assistant.
  • Creating a custom color palette.
  • Creating extensions.
  • Setting up drill-through to a report.
  • Local data cache.

Detailed documentation for Cognos Dashboards

The full set of documentation for using Cognos Dashboards is available in the Cognos Analytics dashboards documentation. This documentation describes all features of Cognos Dashboards, including features that are not supported in Cognos Dashboards for Cloud Pak for Data.

Cognos Analytics offers more functions, including enterprise reporting, AI features, and an even more powerful dashboard experience.

Learn more