Assess applications in your environment before you upgrade

Preparing to upgrade provides an opportunity to review your existing applications and clean up your source environment.

For example, you might have many applications in your environment. However, it is not uncommon to find that a number of applications are not used or no longer meet your requirements.

Assessing your applications is a useful exercise because it can reduce the number of applications to consider during an upgrade.

An audit of your existing applications can include the following tasks:

  • Do a site survey to assess the current production environment and identify areas that require attention during the upgrade. The site survey includes information about the infrastructure, applications, users, and configuration settings.

  • Assess the software that you use in your environment and create a list of the software, such as operating systems, web servers, security providers, and databases.

    To review an up-to-date list of environments that are supported by IBM® Cognos® Analytics products, including information on operating systems, patches, browsers, web servers, directory servers, database servers, and application servers, see the IBM Software Product Compatibility Reports page (www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/735235).

  • Complete a detailed assessment of your applications. The usage, age, size, and complexity of your applications are important factors to consider when planning the upgrade. The total size of the applications can have an impact on the time required to complete the upgrade.

  • List the following information about your configuration:

    • Configuration settings that you enabled in IBM Cognos Configuration

      Installing the new version of the product in a different location than the existing version lets you compare the settings between the two version. To run the two versions you must ensure that you use unique port numbers, web server aliases, and unique content store databases.

    • Changes to other configuration files

      You must manually change other configuration files during the upgrade. If you changed other configuration files, you must assess the changes that you want to preserve in the upgraded environment. This might include .xml, .txt, and .css files in the configuration, templates, webapps, and webcontent directories.

      Note: If you have modified .ini files, please contact Customer Support to determine whether the changes are supported in the new version of the software.

  • Back up your content store database.

After your audit is complete, you can create an upgrade plan.

Guidelines when upgrading your operating system

You might want to consider the following guidelines before you upgrade to a later version of the operating system on the computers where IBM Cognos Analytics is installed:
  • Check the IBM Software Product Compatibility Reports page (www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/735235) to ensure that the IBM Cognos Analytics version supports the version of the operating system you are thinking of moving to.
  • Ensure that the third-party software that is used by IBM Cognos Analytics is supported on the proposed operating system version. Third-party software would include components, such as database and database drivers, application servers, web servers, and browsers.
  • Determine whether you must recompile IBM Cognos Analytics SDK applications.
  • Determine whether you must re-create web deployments, which include web archive (.war) files and enterprise archive (.ear) files.