What is Cognos reporting and its different services and components?

Cognos is business intelligence and performance management software. It enables business users to extract corporate data and analyze it without using any technical knowledge. It is also known as the Cognos reporting tool. It helps to prepare many corporate reports by analyzing data. These reports are presented in the format of graphs, pictures, diagrams, etc. Furthermore, this is more helpful for non-technical people to prepare reports based on the data. 

Cognos reporting tool helps to make great business decisions by reading the reports. These reports are drawn by professional authors of report writing. They analyze and prepare complex reports with proper formatting. Moreover, it is a web-based tool. The Cognos reporting tool will help users in many ways.

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Cognos reporting tool

The Cognos reporting tool is very helpful. Using the Cognos reporting tool, we can create many reports that any organization requires. Such as statements, invoices, bills, sales reports, inventory report, purchase report, etc. Cognos Analytics is very helpful in this regard. The Cognos Analytics Reporting user interface enables us to use this tool to make reports. 

This reporting tool helps the professionals to prepare report layouts and queries, report objects, different styles of reports, etc.  It also helps to create charts, maps, lists, etc. under various reporting formats. 

Cognos reporting tool provides smart reporting formats, easy access to data in data warehouse and other system records. It meets the reporting criteria of any organization that helps to make better decisions. This helps the business to prosper in the future.

IBM Cognos Features

There are many features of Cognos. Some of the important features are as follows. :-

• It provides real-time metrics, events or notifications.
• It offers drag and drops facilities without any assembling.
• It consists of wizard-driven data
• It is an independent and highly scalable platform.
• Moreover, it allows various features like monitoring, reporting, and predictive analysis. 
• It offers personalized interaction 
• Furthermore, it allows it user to edit the existing data. 
• It also offers memory streaming analytics. 

Thus, the above features help the user in many ways to use this software. The business units can make better, faster and accurate decisions based on using these kinds of software and tools.

Cognos architecture

The Cognos environment architecture is a composition of three components. It includes Data, applications and a web server. All these components are based on different functions. There may be different kinds of data. Making this data useful for management is the aim of this tool. Moreover, web communication is done through different BI gateways to share data and information. A gateway is an extension of a web server that helps to share information or data from one webserver to another. All these done with the help of an HTTP load-balancing router under the webserver.

The second component of this architecture is Applications. It includes more than one Cognos BI Servers. A BI server carries out various requests sent from a gateway. Such as reports, analysis, etc. There are three main components of this application stage. It includes IBM Cognos Dispatcher, Reporting Server, and Content Manager. All three components have a different system of working.

The third component in this architecture is Data. It includes a data store and data sources. It works like a relational database and the source of accessing data and information. 

Cognos components and services

There are different types of Cognos components and services. They communicate with each other using BI Bus. These are also known as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). And these support WSDL. The BI Bus component consists of various protocols such as; Log messaging process, Messaging, and dispatching, database connection management, port usage, request processing, etc. 

The following components of Cognos can be discussed below.

Cognos Business Insight: It offers users to create different dashboards using any object. The user can create a fully personalized dashboards where the user permits to view contents as objects. 

Cognos Connection: Cognos connection is a kind of web portal that gives access to the users to Cognos studio. Furthermore, the user can use this component to view, retrieve, publish and manage company reports, scorecards, etc. 

Cognos Report Studio: Using the Cognos reporting tool, the user can prepare different report formats. It allows making charts, maps, graphs, etc to present the report to management in a dynamic way. 

Cognos Metric studio: This component allows the user to monitor and analyze the business metrics within the organization. Here, the user can create certain metrics or criteria and could see the changes in those metrics with business concerns. 

Cognos Analysis Studio: It helps business users to get their queries answered faster. This component helps the business users to understand customers, products and the needs of the organization. Moreover, it helps them to be ahead in the competition and could react faster to the issues. 

Cognos Event Studio: This tool is helpful to send an event notification to the stakeholders of the company regarding any event. The user can create agents for each event. These agents send notifications to the business stakeholders once the limit is reached. 

Cognos reports examples

The Cognos report examples include different types of reports. In the Cognos Query studio, there are various kinds of reports, such as List Reports, Charts and Crosstab reports. Moreover, the IBM Cognos Report Studio samples include, Sample outdoor sales package, Sales and marketing package, Go Data warehouse package, etc. 

In this way, there are many examples of Cognos reporting. Cognos provides different tools that help the user to make reports to present before management. Presenting the reports in a dynamic way using many formats.

Benefits of using Cognos

There are many benefits and advantages of using Cognos, especially for business users. These include the following. :-

• Cognos provides a limitless workspace to its users. It supports the users thinking and their working.
• It also offers different types of BI capacities such as reporting, analysis, dashboards, scorecards, and many more. 
• It helps users to prepare dynamic reports with the help of Cognos reporting tools.
• It helps to view and personalize any information easily. 
• Furthermore, it helps to communicate and share information with the right people in the right place.
• It also helps to increase productivity among workers.
• It allows users to share and alter the content using various applications and tools. 
• It distributes the BI report to its users daily. 
• Moreover, it helps its users in their smooth workflow.
• It is also helpful in making accurate business decisions. 

Among these benefits, it includes a minor disadvantage also. It doesn’t support the analysis for different dimensions.

Thus, the above writings explain what is Cognos reporting and its different components and services in a broadway. Here, it gives an overview of Cognos and its different aspects. Cognos is a reporting tool and the arm of IBM tools and software. It helps it, users, in many ways that include preparing dynamic reports using various tools. Furthermore, these reports help business units and their users to make quick and faster decisions. 

To get a deeper knowledge of Cognos and its different services one can opt for cognos online training from different online sources.  This learning will help the aspirants and professionals to enhance skills and get better career options.