Getting started with IBM Cognos Analytics

Opening IBM Cognos Analytics

You can open the IBM Cognos Analytics UI from the Cloud Pak for AIOps console main navigation menu by clicking Visualize > Cognos. The IBM Cognos Analytics UI opens in a new browser tab.

The IBM Cognos Analytics UI includes an AI Assistant (left pane of the UI), and a Details pane (right side of the UI), to help interpret the chart that you are viewing. The Assistant supports natural language exploration, while the Details pane provides system-generated plain-language information to augment the chart. The Explore feature reduces the guesswork that is associated with data exploration by finding the strongest relationships in your data. The relationships are displayed in the relationship diagram, and suggested starting points are offered for more data exploration.

Important: To access and use IBM Cognos Analytics to create and use dashboards and other visualization tools, you must have a user role with the following permissions:

• Manage dashboards/reports
• View dashboards

Supported features

The following features are supported in IBM Cognos Analytics for use with IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps data:

• Dashboards

  Note: Embedding visualization code is not supported.

• Stories

• Explorations

• Data modules

• Reporting

Working with dashboards

You can create a dashboard within IBM Cognos Analytics to build visualizations of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps data, such as alert and topology data. IBM Cognos Analytics dashboards help you to monitor events or activities at a glance by providing key insights and analysis about your data on one or more pages or screens. For more information, see Creating a dashboard. For more information about editing an existing dashboard, see Editing a dashboard.

For detailed instructions and information about working with dashboards, review the IBM Cognos Analytics documentation Dashboards. This page lists various topics to explore to learn more about using and understanding dashboards within IBM Cognos Analytics. For tutorial about the basics for creating a dashboard, see Cognos Analytics dashboards: a tutorial

For more information about building the visualizations on your dashboard, see the IBM Cognos Analytics documentation Visualizations. As part of building the visualizations, you can use IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps widgets within IBM Cognos Analytics.

You can also create custom visualizations to meet your specific business needs. For more information, see Custom Visualizations Developer. For a step-by-step guide for how to set up your development environment, create custom visualizations, and deploy and authorize the visualization, see Step-by-step guide for custom visualizations.

IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps widgets

IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps provides a default setup for creating 4 custom widgets. When you have configured the data flow to include IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps data in IBM Cognos Analytics, you can create these widgets. For more information, see IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps widgets within IBM Cognos Analytics.

Working with reports

You can create reports to meet your various needs, such as alert resolution rates or impacted resource reports. When you create a report, you are actually creating a report specification. The report specification defines the queries and prompts that are used to retrieve data and the layouts and styles used to present the data. For simplicity, the report specification is named by the same name as the report. For more information about creating and using reports, the IBM Cognos Analytics documentation Reporting. This page lists various topics to get started with creating reports based on your data within IBM Cognos Analytics.