Application tier: components

Configuring and managing the product - IBM Cognos Configuration

IBM Cognos Configuration is used to configure Cognos Analytics, and to start and stop its services.

Publishing, managing, and viewing content - Cognos Analytics portal

Cognos Analytics portal provides a single access point to the corporate data available for its products. It provides a single point of entry for querying, analyzing, and organizing data, and for creating reports, scorecards, and events. Users can run all their web-based Cognos Analytics applications through the portal. Other applications, and web addresses to other applications, can be integrated with the portal.

Professional reporting

Using the Reporting tool, report authors create, edit, and distribute a wide range of professional reports.

Dashboarding

Cognos Analytics provides dashboards to communicate your insights and analysis. You can assemble a view that contains visualizations such as a graph, chart, plot, table, map, or any other visual representation of data.

A dashboard is a type of view that helps you to monitor events or activities at a glance. It provides key insights and analysis about your data on one or more pages or screens.

Central administration - Manage and Administration Console

Cognos Analytics has a Manage function that you can use to perform common administration tasks day to day. An option from the Manage menu opens the Administration Console, a central management interface that contains the administrative tasks for IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson. It provides easy access to the overall management of the IBM Cognos environment. Access to the administration functions depends on user's permissions.

Ad hoc querying and self-service reporting - Query Studio

Using Query Studio, users with little or no training can quickly design, create and save reports to meet reporting needs not covered by the standard, professional reports created in Reporting.

Monitoring data for exceptional conditions - Event Studio

In Event Studio, you set up agents to monitor your data and perform tasks when business events or exceptional conditions occur in your data that must be dealt with. When an event occurs, people are alerted to take action. Agents can publish details to the portal, deliver alerts by email, run and distribute reports based on events, and monitor the status of events. For example, a support call from a key customer or the cancellation of a large order may trigger an event, sending an e-mail to the appropriate people.

Facilitating decision-making - IBM Cognos Workspace

You can create sophisticated interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content, as well as external data sources such as TM1® Websheets and CubeViews, according to your specific information needs. You can view and open favorite workspaces and reports, manipulate the content, and e-mail your findings. You can also use comments and activities for collaborative decision making.

You can also use social software such as IBM Connections for collaborative decision making.

Microsoft Office compatibility - IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office

Using IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office users can access data and visualizations from IBM Cognos reports within Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

Cognos for Microsoft Office components are included with Cognos Analytics and must be installed separately.