Cognos Archival / Retention not working as expected - need help

[brandon_uo]

Hey everyone,

I recently inherited a Cognos Analytics environment in my new role. I have no experience with the software and I'm leaning on IBM docs and this forum to get me up to speed.

I'm currently trying to clean up our content store in preparation to upgrade to a new Cognos version. Part of that is setting up content archival and retention rules.

I'm following the IBM docs (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/11.1.0?topic=guide-cognos-content-archival) and have the archival repository configured.

Where I'm running into an issue is the expected behavior of the archival and retention tasks. Per the docs, I created an archival maintenance task and ran it. I then created and ran a retention rule and specified how many report outputs I wanted to keep in the content store.

What I expected to happen is any report output past the number of occurrences specified would be moved to the archive, but what I'm seeing is the report output simply deleted.

For example, I specified the retention rule as 3 output versions on a folder that had a report with 5 output version. Those excess 2 outputs were not moved to the archive. I even tried re-running the archive task to see if maybe the output was still in the content store and just not viewable in the UI, but the task still didn't move the output the archive.

I see this note in the IBM docs for the retention rule task:

"Run this task only after creating and running the content archival task. If you run it before, content that was not marked for archival is permanently deleted from the content store."

I made sure to run the archival task before the retention task, so I'm confused where I'm going wrong.

The only way I've been able to get archival to actually run is run the retention rule, generate report output past the specified output value, then run the archive task.

What I'm really hoping to accomplish is archiving existing report output without deleting it. Am I missing something entirely or is this not an option?


Fwiw we're on version 11.1.X in a unix/oracle environment.
Thanks in advance!

[DaBaker]

Hello -

Cognos does not do a good job of saving those outputs.
Everything you are doing seems correct - then Cognos deletes them from the Content Store.

That is why we created a Module in MetaManager for it "Content Extractor" It saves the outputs to a file system and then you can switch the retentions to whatever number you want, and Cognos will delete all the outputs that are more than X number you have set.  Obviously if it is set to 0 it saves them forever.
You can also save the outputs and other content in a MetaManager Backup Module for later restoring options.