Cognos BI workload

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The workload generator for Cognos® BI allows to put a couple of scenarios together until a typical Business Intelligence transaction mix is formed. The different scenarios have different shares in the workload mix and are executed in a given sequence by every emulated user over and over again.

The workload shares for the different scenarios are selected to focus on the latest technologies introduced with Cognos 10, for example, Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) and the new charting engine.

Two different DB2® databases contain some sample data used for BI processing. The sample databases reside in their own virtual machine separated from the Content Store database.

Table 1 shows the percentages for the different selected workload scenarios.

Table 1. Cognos BI workload scenario percentages
Cognos BI scenario Workload share
interactive reporting and ad hoc analysis
  • uses Dynamic Query Mode (DQM)
 30%
Chart and report creation
  • uses the new charting engine
20%
Dashboard activity
  • users open multiple pages in a browser session
 30%
retrieve PDF reports
  • users access saved PDFs reports in the Content Store
 10%
retrieve HTML reports
  • users access saved HTML reports in the Content Store
 10%

Adjusting the workload level

The number of users serves to adjust the CPU load level for the Cognos BI Server. For the performance tests and the tests with the z/VM® Resource Manager, well-defined CPU load levels for Cognos BI were required.

Figure 1. LPAR total CPU load for a different number of Cognos users

LPAR total CPU load for a different number of Cognos users

Figure 1 shows the overall LPAR CPU load levels with different numbers of users for the Cognos BI Server. The LPAR is defined with 10 IFLs and z/VM virtualizes the environment. For the CPU load level tests, the Cognos BI workload is the only workload running. The z/VM guests with the DayTrader workload are not running at this time. These Cognos BI CPU load levels are used in topic Results. Table 2 introduces three labels representing a certain Cognos BI Server CPU load level.

Table 2. Cognos BI Server CPU load levels
Cognos BI Server CPU load levels Description
Cognos70
  • workload runs with 5 concurrent users
  • approx. 70% of the available IFLs are used
  • default CPU load level for measurements
Cognos90
  • workload runs with 10 concurrent users
  • approx. 90% of the available IFLs are used
  • used only for selected test scenarios
Cognos95
  • workload runs with 15 concurrent users
  • approx. 95% of the available IFLs are used
  • almost all IFLs are used
  • used only for some test purposes