Dispatcher routing

Depending on how your system is set up, you may want to control how reports are distributed among servers.

For example, you have different departments that maintain their own servers, or you have specific servers set up for specific data access, such as Microsoft Windows servers for Microsoft SQL Server databases and Linux® servers set up for IBM® Db2® access. You can set up IBM Cognos® software so that report requests are processed by specific servers by applying routing rules.

Affinity settings take precedence over advanced routing settings. For more information, see Maximum Number of Processes and Connections.

When you define the routing rules, you must select a server group. Server group names are a property of a dispatcher or the configuration folders into which the dispatchers are organized. For more information to set server group names, see Creating server groups for advanced dispatcher routing.

To determine which server groups process certain reports, you must associate the server groups with routing tags for data objects, such as packages, data modules, or uploaded files, and for user groups or roles. Then, you need to specify how the routing tags are distributed among the dispatchers in your environment. The distribution is controlled by routing rules that you create for the routing tags. The report request will be processed by a specific server depending on the routing tags associated with the data object from which the report was created and/or the user or group running the report.

Tip: A routing tag can by any word or phrase, but as a best practice, specify a tag that is meaningful for your environment. You could have tags such as Sales reports, Db2 data, Europe.

When you create the routing rules, you create conditions that determine the server groups by which the reports are to be processed. For example, you can set up routing rules so that reports from a Finance package that were created by a user in the Finance group are processed by Finance servers. Alternatively, you can set up routing rules so that reports that were created by any Sales users, regardless of which data object was used to create the report, are processed by the Sales servers. In the first example, you would specify routing tags for both the group or role and the package, but in the second example you would only specify a routing tag for the group or role and leave the package routing tag blank. You do not have to specify a routing tag for both the data object and the group or role in your routing rules.

You must have the required permissions to access IBM Cognos Administration functionality. For more information, see User capabilities.

Note: Cognos Analytics Processor Value Units (PVUs) are licensed according to the dispatcher service. Each license must be associated with a unique dispatcher service. This association allows IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) to accurately calculate the PVU value for each Cognos Analytics client license. For more information, see License Metric Tool - Getting started.