Distributed server installation

A distributed server installation allows you to run IBM® Cognos® Analytics server components on different machines.

When you install the 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.

You need administration privileges to install and uninstall IBM Cognos Analytics.

Before you begin

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

Application tier

The application tier contains one or more Cognos Analytics servers. The servers run requests, such as reports, analyses, and queries that are forwarded by the gateway, and renders the interfaces.

To learn how install the application tier component, see Application Tier Installation.

Data tier: Content Manager

The data tier, also known as Content Manager, manages the storage of application data, including security, configuration data, models, report specifications, and report outputs. Content Manager is needed to publish packages, retrieve and store report specifications, manage scheduling information, and manage the Cognos namespace.

To learn how install the content tier component, see Content Tier Installation.

Gateway tier

The gateway tier allows you to set up advanced options such as single sign-on with Kerberos security with IIS, or an architecture where the web server is publicly available outside a firewall. IBM Cognos Analytics uses the web server for load balancing certain requests in addition to hosting and serving static content like icons and image files.

To learn how install the gateway tier component, see Gateway Tier Installation.

Required and Optional tasks after installation

The following chart shows required and optional tasks after installing components.

Table 1.
Task Resources Required or Optional

You must use one of the supported enterprise-level databases as the content store in a production environment.

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.

See Content Store.

 Required

Configure after installing components.

These configuration actions are critical to the success of your installation.

See JDBC Drivers for Audit an Notification Store Databases.

 Required

Use a separate database for notification in situations where you run large volumes of batch reports and email.

By default, the notification server uses the same database that Content Manager uses for the content store.

See Notification Store Documentation.

 Required

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.

 Required
You can create an audit data base to store log messages.

See Audit Database.

 Optional

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

See Mail Server Setup.

 Optional
Configure your web server.

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.

For more information, see Gateway Documentation

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

For more information, see Internet Information Server Automated Script.

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.

For more information, see WEBDAV on IIS Documentation

 Optional
Configure your web server (configure)

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.

For more information, see WEBDAV Apache/IBM HTTP Server

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.

For more information, see Apache / IBM HTTP Server (IHS) Scripts