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Performance Management

Overview

You Can’t Always Fix Unknown Problems With Band-Aid Solutions

You’re facing a performance issue and you’ve tried all the usual fixes and standard recommendations (wondering what those are? Click HERE to learn from IBM’s Martin Keller). You’ve faced problems before but this time it’s different. This time the issue just won’t go away. IBM support told you one thing, your DBA told you another, the armchair advisors have all failed, and you’ve already ventured down an endless rabbit hole on Google. What you thought would be a simple solution has turned out not to be a quick fix whatsoever. Everyone has their good intentions but how do you know if any of their suggestions will even result in any sort of improvement?
Of course you could use the “trial and error” approach and methodically change one piece at a time but that would take FOREVER. But what if there was a way to take those suggested solutions and immediately verify if they solved the problem or not? A way to easily pinpoint the issue while quickly eliminating the solutions that didn’t work.

But…Do We Even Have A Problem?

Even the ancient Greeks knew “the only constant in life is change”. Thanks Heraclitus. Now whether that change is a new data warehouse or infrastructure, going from Teradata to Snowflake, Hadoop to Delta Lake, or even moving to the Cognos Cloud, the same rules apply. And while you might work great under pressure, that doesn’t guarantee that your system will. You have to know the impact of what these changes are and the best way to do that is to put stress on your system through repeatable actions.

Features

The Next Step In Your Approach

Cognos Performance issues are a lot like a new car. When you first buy it, you’re not worried about the battery at all. The first time the car battery dies, of course you can just jump it and keep going about your business, but what happens when the battery dies that second and third time? The point is, there’s no need to worry when you already know the limitations of your system and have a way to accurately monitor it.

Better To Be Safe Than Sorry

ReportCard won’t give you psychic abilities to predict if and when things will happen (we wish), but it will help you spot future problems before they occur. Some problems may come and go. Honestly, some may never occur again. But what happens when that once in awhile “we’ll worry about it later” issue becomes more persistent? Or even more permanent?

With ReportCard we change “What If” to “That’s Why” by giving you the ability to:

  • Monitor and record Cognos
  • Prevent Subsequent Problems Proactively
  • Understand User Activity/Behavior and Infrastructure Activities
  •  Isolate Disruptions And Mitigate Interruptions With Real-Time Alerts
  •  Identify System Hiccups and Performance Issues
  •  Validate Measures through Instant Replay
  •  
And in the Cloud, you have even less control, leaving you more vulnerable to various problem areas such as:
  • The bridge
  • Host-made changes
  • Your data sources
  • Or maybe it’s just not performing

Fixing The Problem Doesn’t Always Fix The Cause

You’ve applied multiple solutions to no avail and it feels like you’ve done all that hard work for nothing. Instead of throwing multiple solutions against the wall to see what sticks, you can use ReportCard to get to the source of the problem without wasting time.

Quit Guessing Why Your System’s Stressing

The answer is easy: Use your system, not some fictitious data.

With ReportCard you can treat your problems like guidelines instead of stop signs by:

  • Record Cognos Activity and System Behavior
  • Analyze and Find the Root Cause of the Problem
  • Remediate the Problem
  • Replay to Ensure Improved System Behavior

Generic Load Testing Tools Lead To A Dead End

With tools like LoadRunner or Jmeter you’ll have to spend tons of time setting up the scripts you need to use. Not to mention the extensive knowledge required to use those tools and execute Cognos reports with different parameter sets. And don’t forget, you cant use real or actual activity data either. With ReportCard we’ve taken all that complexity away. You choose the reports and parameters and we’ll do the rest. ReportCard can even use Cognos audit data to come up with a real-world load test.

Real-World Solutions Need Real-World Scenarios

Easily Recreate Real-World Test Scenarios When:
  • Performing Cognos Upgrades
  • Moving from On-Premise to Cloud
  • Changing Hardware, OS, DBMS for your Cognos components and\or data sources
  • Visualize Cognos activity alongside server metrics
  • Apply different load criteria to confirm your infrastructure supports Cognos applications
  • Schedule testing to verify system performance doesn’t degrade over time
  • Track Cognos service status and receive notifications of service errors
  • Customize notifications to obtain real-time alerts
  • Scan report specifications to identify performance issues and validate improvement

ReportCard Quickly Identifies The Problem And Leads To Solutions

ReportCard, IBM’s Chosen Tool Is The One To Use. Why? Because it seamlessly integrates with Cognos and can simulate actual user behavior, excluding possible culprits and helping you get to the root of the problem.

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