Integrating with Cognos

IBM® Sterling Order Management System is integrated with Cognos such that you can generate operational reports with low data volume for your short-term analysis.

Sterling Order Management System uses a multi-tenant implementation of Cognos on Cloud. Unbounded or non-performing SQL queries that are generated by using Cognos can impact client operations and can risk the environment stability. Therefore, IBM Cognos® Analytics supports report generation on a daily or weekly basis depending on the data volume.

Writing direct SQL queries within Cognos is not permitted.

Cognos provides an ability to create custom SQL inside the report studio. However, this option is not available as part of the integration with Sterling Order Management System. IBM Cognos Analytics ensures the stability and scalability of the Sterling Order Management System application. Cognos reports must be run against a data model per Cognos best practices. Model queries are further optimized by Cognos with an internal limit on the number of records that can be retrieved. Custom SQL queries do not have these guardrails and are therefore unavailable in the Cognos on Cloud environments for Sterling Order Management System.

By default, IBM Cognos Analytics on Cloud can be used to generate reports for low data volume by using the Cloud Service data within the limits of the Cloud Service. You must use IBM Cognos Analytics for operational reporting and not as an analytical tool.

A data model is provided by default, which contains a subset of most commonly used transactional tables and some configuration tables. You can use these models to run your reports. If you need more tables from the database or the application tables contain extended columns, you can extend the model. For more information, see Extending the Operational Reporting Data Model.

You can run the sample reports for a maximum of 7-day period.

Permissions in Cognos are based on the user groups in Sterling Order Management System. A user must belong to one of the following groups to access the Cognos application:

To run the reports, the user must belong to the BI_USER group.
To create or modify reports, the user must belong to the BI_AUTHOR group.
To manage folder and file permissions, the user must belong to the BI_DATA_MANAGER group.

For more information, see Cognos user groups and permissions.

Datastore connection for Sterling Order Management System

Cognos on Cloud is connected to the Sterling Order Management System high availability disaster recovery standby database to eliminate any performance impact on the Sterling Order Management System production environment.

The operational reports are run against the production standby database.

This approach eliminates the performance impact on the Sterling Order Management System environment with the following tradeoffs:

Columns that contain CLOB data cannot be included in a report. Attempts to query columns with CLOB data cause the query to fail.
If the primary database becomes unavailable to Sterling Order Management System, you cannot run the reports because the database that is used by the reports becomes live. Report is not generated to prevent the impact on performance.

Scenarios in which the primary database can become unavailable include routine database maintenance that you schedule, and failover of the primary database to the standby database.

The integration supports generation of operational reports with low data volume. You can generate daily or weekly reports based on the data volume. You can also use the Prompt filter option in Cognos to generate specific category reports such as reports for a specific enterprise, node, or region.

To protect the availability and performance of the environment, reports run for maximum of 2.5 hours after which, the session stops automatically. However, you can schedule your reports to run them in the background for the report to be generated. Once the report is generated, the results of the report are sent by Cognos through the email, which is based on the delivery method that is configured in the schedule options in Cognos.

Note: The reports that are run during the database maintenance window fails.

The Operational Reporting component works with data that is maintained in the DB2 database. If your inventory is maintained in IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility, it is recommended that you use Order Hub to view inventory-related metrics. For more information about Order Hub, see Using Order Hub.

Environments

Legacy platform IBM Cognos Analytics is enabled only for QA and Production environments on cloud. However, it is not bundled with the developer toolkit that is available by default. The integration provides only one Cognos QA environment by default. If you have multiple QA environments, ensure that you select an environment which most closely resembles your Production environment. If you need additional environments, contact the Customer Support Portal.

Next-generation platform As part of the integration, IBM Cognos Analytics is enabled only on Preproduction and Production environments on cloud. IBM Cognos Analytics is not integrated with the QA environment.

Note: You cannot optimize the Cognos operational reports to gather a set of data from the QA or Preproduction environment and compare that with the Production environment.

The performance of reports in the Cognos QA or Preproduction environment does not directly indicate the performance of the same report in the Cognos Production environment. The performance of reports depends on the data volumes.

Cognos on Cloud limitations

The print option in IBM Cognos Analytics is for a local network printer. Since the server is on cloud, the print feature is unavailable. However, you can save the scheduled report as a PDF document or as a spreadsheet that can be easily printed.
Cognos on Cloud does not provide an option to manage images on the server. However, you can add the images to reports as an HTML object.
You cannot save the report output to a local or a shared folder in a file server.

Reports for large data volume

If you need to generate reports with large data volume for analytical purposes such as financial or predictions, which generally ranges from multiple weeks to months, you can use the data extract service to periodically send data in to your ETL or business intelligence systems. To export bulk data, you must integrate Sterling Order Management System with your ETL or Business Intelligence systems. You can then query the data that you need from that system.

You can also leverage API events such as OnSuccess events on the createOrderOnSuccess transactions and use JMS to send data to your ETL or business intelligence system for querying the data that you need from that system.

You can also use the dashboards in Order Hub to view the order data on the Sterling Order Management System next-generation platform if you use IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility for managing your inventory.