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Cognos Analytics Performance Tuning

Tips and Tricks to Rev Performance

Cognos Analytics has literally hundreds of configurations and settings options. Knowing their capabilities will ensure your Cognos environment is tuned for best performance and stability. For example, the latest release includes an Interactive Performance Assistant (IPA) to view query and rendered performance on report objects.

In this webinar recording, our in-house Cognos expert and practice lead, Todd Schuman tells you how to use the IPA feature and shares lots of other tips and tricks to improve the performance of your Cognos environment.

Topics covered in this high-performance webinar included

• Hardware and server specifics
• Failover and high availability
• High and low affinity requests
• Overview of services
• Java heap settings
• IIS configurations
• Non-Cognos related tuning

You may also be interested in learning steps for installing and upgrading your Cognos environment in our Tips for Installing Cognos Analytics webinar recording.

TECHNOLOGIES COVERED

Cognos Analytics v11, Cognos BI

RECOMMENDED AUDIENCES

BI Report Authors, BI Power Users (Developers, Support Staff), BI Managers, Business Analysts

PRESENTER

Todd Schuman
Practice Lead – Installations, Upgrades and Performance Tuning
Senturus, Inc.

Todd heads up the Installation, Upgrade and Performance Tuning practice at Senturus, bringing more than 16 years of Cognos and Tableau experience to his role. Since his early days in BI working with Cognos Enterprise Planning and Cognos Impromptu to today, Todd has worked extensively on developing and designing enterprise systems and reports. In addition to managing and performing multiple architecture engagements at Senturus, Todd works closely with the IBM Cognos product development team to stay abreast the latest enhancements and changes.

PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Hardware and Server Specifics

• Use the following processor settings as a starting point and adjust them based on the use of your system
  • Content manager – 4 CPU
  • Dispatcher – 8 CPU
  • Server can have multiple sockets
  • Each socket can house a CPU
  • CPU can have 1-48 cores
  • Logical processors <> cores
  • Hyper threading
• RAM
  • Use the following memory settings as a starting point and adjust them based on the memory use of your system
    • 4 GB for the base operating system and accompanying software, such as antivirus, back up and enterprise management software 
    • 4 GB for a 64-bit content manager JVM 
    • 4 GB for a 64-bit application tier JVM 
    • 1 GB for the Cognos graphics service JVM 
    • 8 GB for the query service (Dynamic Query Mode) JVM 
    • 1.5 GB for each batch/interactive report service

Architecture – Distributed Environments

• Basic distributed environment
  • Dedicated:
    • Gateway
    • Dispatchers
    • Content manager
• Distributed environment with failover
  • Active/standby content manager
    • Both pointed to same content store
    • First CM to start becomes active
    • Standby always checking for active up status
    • Will become active when primary becomes unresponsive
• High availability (HA)
  • No single point of failure
  • At least 2 of each Cognos component (gateway, dispatcher, CM)
  • Load balancer for gateways

Tuning

• High affinity activities
  • Report viewer links
    • Run again
    • Return
  • HTML report navigation
    • Top page
    • Page up
    • Page down
    • Bottom page
  • Delivery options
    • Save
    • Save As
    • Print
    • Email
    • Viewing
• Low affinity activities
  • Report querying
    • Reporting
    • Report processing
  • Report authoring
    • Metadata retrieval
    • Query validation
  • Administrative
    • Testing data source connections
    • Adding objects (folders, jobs, schedules, etc.)
    • Refreshing portal page
• Cognos services
  • Running reports
    • Batch – running in the background
      • Jobs
      • Schedules
      • Emails
      • Saved output
      • Triggers
  • Report – interactive, user actively involved and watching screen
• Peak vs non-peak
  • 24 hour clock
  • Defaults
    • 7 (am) start
    • 18 (6 pm) end
  • Recommended
    • Give report service priority during peak
    • Give batch server priority during non peak
• Concurrent users
  • 100:10:1 rule
  • 100 named users
  • 10 active Users
  • 1 concurrent user
  • 4000 named users = 40 concurrent users
• Putting it all together
  • Affinity + Cognos service + peak/non peak
  • Be aware
    • Each connection is multiplied by the number of processes
      • 16 low affinity (8*2)
      • 4 high affinity (2*2)
      • 20 total connections
    • # of CPU * (2-4) = # of connections
    • 5 GB RAM * # of connections
• Report status
• Server monitoring
•  

Virtual Servers

• Traditional vs virtual
• VM recommendations
  • Dedicated resources
  • Enterprise level host hardware
  • 5-10% overhead

Report Specific Tuning

• Data Explosion
  • Data
    • Queries/SQL
    • SQL execution plan
    • Joins/modeling
    • Star Schema/data warehouse
    • Indexes
    • Summary tables
    • Cubes (Transformer PowerCubes/Dynamic Cubes)
• Interactive Performance Assistance (IPA)
  • New with R7
  • HTML only
  • Enable
    • Run option dropdown
    • Show run options
    • Include performance details
  • Output
    • Execution time (in milliseconds)
    • Rendering time (hover)
    • Query time (hover)