Getting started with Cognos Dashboards

Use the Cognos Dashboards service to build interactive visualizations to explore, analyze, and present your data.

Cognos Dashboards provides a graphical canvas for a business user to investigate data for patterns and insights. The service includes a wide range of customizable visualization options to help you create interactive dashboards.

You don't need to understand coding or SQL to gain insights. To build a dashboard, drag data sources, visualizations, and widgets to the main canvas. You can also customize the appearance of the visualizations to make the data more visually appealing.

Checking whether the service is installed

An administrator must install Cognos Dashboards.

To check whether the service is installed:

  1. From the navigation menu, select Services > Services catalog.
  2. Search for Cognos Dashboards.

If the service is installed and ready to use, the tile in the catalog shows Ready to use.

Accessing the service

Cloud Pak for Data This service is available from the IBM Cloud Pak® for Data experience.

  1. Set up Cognos Dashboards permissions.

    For more information, see Setting up Cognos Dashboards permissions.

  2. Set up the project that you are using to work with dashboards.

    For more information, see Before you start.

  3. Create a dashboard in your project.
    1. Click Assets to view a list of available assets for your project.
    2. From the Assets page, click New Assets.
    3. From the New asset page, go to the Graphical builders section, then click Visualize data in dashboards.
    4. Follow the dialog prompts to create your new dashboard.

    For more information about how to create the dashboard, see Creating a dashboard.

Learn more

To learn more about Cognos Dashboards, see the following topics in the IBM Cloud Pak for Data documentation: