How to know about active sessions in Cognos?

[Cognoster]

HI cognoise

My question is
can we explore if there is any way in which Cognos keeps a log of the OS user who have active sessions in Cognos?

Peace
Cognoster

[IceTea]

Hi,

you can go for the Audit informations from the Audit package. All Log-on and Log-Off-Operations are stored there. We achieved all active sessions on filtering on "Log of Operation" = null.

[Cognoster]

I have enabled the logconsole.exe. Is there any provision in the logconsole to know which query is running and which user is running thsi query, can
we fire sql queries in logconsole to retrieve specific information.

Am also facing some challenges while creating namespace id in cognos config, the cognos service doesn't start successfully.

[IceTea]

Ahem. I know nothing about a logconsole.exe.

Are you familiar with the cognos concept of auditing system usage information? The Audit informations are stored in a Audit database. You can access the Audit informations in a pre configured cognos package, which also containts many predefined audit report specifications.

If not, i recommend you to do so with the refering cognos guide.

[Cognoster]

We know that Cognos 8 has a 3 tier architecture,in the third tier we have content store , query database, metric stores (reference cog deployment guide). Suppose a user authors a report , and the query is generated, is there any provision to know about the query generated, and does the query database refers to the content store database.

[MMcBride]

I am not sure if that is exactly what Cognos is refering to when it says it is a Three Tier architecture, I took the three tiers to be Client, App Server, Database but it has been a while since I have read the deployment guide so forgive me if I am mistaken.


Couple of things here though

When you set up your Audit/Log information you can select an option "Audit the native query for report service" for a few of the services this will give you more information about a query at report execution time.

Also I would avoid the Logconsole.exe file if I were you. It is a powerful tool that is not really supported by IBM I messed a perfectly good Cognos install digging around in this tool. I started getting thousands upon thousands of xml files in my Logs directory (like 30,000 a day) which caused the system to act very erraticaly and produced gigs and gigs of Dump files. I went to Cognos for help and after a month and a half we gave up trying to fix it and ended up having to wipe out the system and rebuild it from the ground up to fix the problem. Since then I will use the LogviewV2.exe file to search through my logs and I avoid the LogConsole.exe like the plague...  Just a heads up...

[MMcBride]

is there any provision to know about the query generated, and does the query database refers to the content store database.

Sorry to reply again - no I am not just working my post count :) I reread this and got to thinking perhaps a quick explanation of the Content Store is in order...

The Content Store is simply a repository of information the Cognos server uses to run. It stores the XML of a Report, and versions saved with Data in HTML / XML Format.
The Content Store also contains Database Connectivity information for Data Stores.

A Data Store is not the same thing as the Content Store, the Data Store is the actual database where your business data resides. Data Store isn't even a real name I am just using it to clearly differentiate between a normal Database and the Content Store.


The SQL Information on a Query in stored in the XML Definition of a report, You can look at this inside of the Report Specifications of Report Studio easier then any where else.


If you want to see the actual SQL generated you can either log this via my post above or you can use your Database Utilities to capture the SQL submitted.

If you want to see the SQL to access the Content Store - to my knowledge your only option is to use your Database tools outside of Cognos.

Where does the Metric Store fit? A metric Store is a Repository unique to each metric package defined that does store business data

You can have many Data Stores in your environment, you can have many metric Stores in your environment but you will only ever have 1 Content Store

I hope this helps clarify things a bit

[Cognoster]

many thaks MMC  ;D