Distributed server installation

Procedure to install IBM® Cognos® Analytics in a distributed environment. When you install IBM® Cognos® Analytics server components, you can specify where to place the application tier, the data tier (Content Manager), and the gateway tier components. Choose this option to maximize performance, availability, capacity, or security based on the processing characteristics of your organization.

Important: You must specify fully qualified host names in the values for the following Cognos Configuration fields. Each value you specify must also appear in either the field Subject Alternative Name > DNS names or the field Subject Alternative Name > IP addresses.
  • Environment
    • Gateway URI
    • External dispatcher URI
    • Internal dispatcher URI
    • Dispatcher URI for external applications
    • Content Manager URIs
  • Environment > Configuration Group
    • Group contact host
    • Member coordination host
  • Security > Cryptography > Cognos
    • Server common name
    • Subject Alternative Name > DNS names
    • Subject Alternative Name > IP addresses

Before you begin

  1. Required :

    The content store is a database that Content Manager uses to store global configuration data, global settings (such as the language and currency formats shown in the user interface), connections to data sources, and product-specific content. You must use one of the supported enterprise-level databases as the content store in a production environment.

    See Content Store

  2. These configuration actions are critical to the success of your installation. Take these required actions after you install the components.

    See JDBC Drivers for Audit an Notification Store Databases

  3. By default, the notification server uses the same database that Content Manager uses for the content store. You can use a separate database for notification in situations where you run large volumes of batch reports and email.

    See Notification Store Documentation

  4. For authenticated logon, you must configure IBM Cognos Analytics components with an appropriate namespace for the type of authentication provider in your environment. You can configure multiple namespaces for authentication and then choose, at run time, which namespace you want to use

    See Authentication Provider

  5. Optional:

    1. You can create an audit database to store log messages.

      See Audit Database

    2. Web server:

      1. You must configure your web server before users can connect to the IBM® Cognos® Analytics portal. For IBM Cognos Analytics for reporting, you must also set the content expiry for the images directory in your web server so that the web browser does not check image status after the first access.

        See Gateway Documentation

      2. This tool automates the configuration steps based on the IBM Knowledge Center article – Configuring IIS with Cognos Analytics.

        See Internet Information Server Automated Script

      3. To view and browse images in the Reporting, configure Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) on your web server. Report authors can browse for images to include in reports in a way that is similar to browsing a file system. On Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web servers, you must first enable the WebDAV feature, and then configure your web server to access the image location.

        See WEBDAV on IIS Documentation

      4. To view and browse images in the Reporting, configure Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) on your web server. Report authors can browse for images to include in reports in a way that is similar to browsing a file system.

        See WEBDAV Apache/IBM HTTP Server

      5. After you complete this procedure, the server can handle requests for static files (such as .js, .html, .css), load balance requests to IBM Cognos Analytics, and route SSO requests through the IBM Cognos Analytics gateway code.

        See Apache / IBM HTTP Server (IHS) Scripts

    3. Configure your IBM® Cognos® Analytics mail server to send notifications using IBM Cognos Event Studio.

      See Mail Server Setup

Results