By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.
Perhaps the greatest undervalued asset within Cognos Analytics is the audit data that gets generated for virtually everything that happens inside the application. In its native form it’s all but unusable for anything except rudimentary analysis. We’ve covered this subject in great detail in our Ebook, Expert Guide to Cognos Audit Data. Writing this prompted us to challenge the thinking that there’s only so much that you can do with this data as it comes from Cognos.
What if you could use your audit data for anything you wanted to?
In trying to answer this question we set out to see just how far one could go with the Cognos audit data if you could successfully address all the issues of dealing with the data as it is. This resulted in creating a totally new version of our UniVisn product that significantly expanded its breadth and functionality. One part of this was creating Cognos audit data dashboards that had real value. That is, they reflect true summary level information on performance within the Cognos environment, but also had all the detail data readily available.
Another thing was to see just how far we could go with creating Cognos audit data on steroids using Cognos 11. The two key points here are:
- All of the data are from Cognos audit logs and the Content Store
- It’s all represented here using Cognos’ tools
Key dimensions in using Cognos audit data are activity by user, report and package so that will be our focus here.
This image shows summary usage by package and for the Sales and Finance packages for quarter to date:
This image shows detail usage activity by Cognos Package for quarter to date:
This image shows summary user activity for quarter to date along with detail for individual users:
This image shows detail report usage by report for individual user Sevell Dubois:
The essence of dashboards is capturing the main thing or things in a clear, crisp manner. The big picture at the top with the detail readily available if needed. In creating these dashboard examples we have summary and detail data combined in some cases to show what can be done when all the audit data are available for use.
To learn more about how we were able to do this check out our latest UniVisn release.
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