Helping You Help Yourself with Cognos Diagnostic Tools

by Emilia Clein, Manager SDK Development and Diagnostic Tools and
by Rhonda Hashem, Diagnostic Tools Development, NA Customer Support, Cognos Inc.

Timely and accurate data collection about your system environment, Cognos product configuration and settings information are crucial to speeding issue resolution and improving productivity of your IT team.

Cognos Support has developed a number of diagnostic tools to help verify your software environment, identify and troubleshoot issues and provide you with the product details and systems information needed to log a support case. These diagnostics have been primarily developed in Java and each one consists of a JAR file, a batch file and a PDF file which explains what the diagnostic does and the results you can expect. Diagnostics are read-only and do not make any changes to your environment or Cognos products.

Advertisement Cognos Diagnostic Tools Email us for additional diagnostic requirements and feedback on available tools.

Benefits of Diagnostic Tools

Diagnostics and troubleshooting tools are widely used in the software industry to help users troubleshoot issues or automate the collection of particular data. The results can be used for internal diagnosis or be attached to a support case logged with Cognos Support.

For instance, you may want to run the Cognos Conformance Health Check diagnostic before installing a Cognos product to check if your system is compatible.

Perhaps you are on a WebEx session with Cognos Support and need to know details about the data, system and environment settings, product configuration, as well as hot sites and patches currently installed?  Try running one of the product-specific or system overview diagnostic and the information you need is quickly at your fingertips.

Or did an application run smoothly on the development environment however when you were ready to deploy in a production environment, you encountered issues? You could run a diagnostic to help you identify the differences between two environments.

All of these diagnostic tools are now available for download from the Cognos Support Web site. Our initial release targets Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence products, Cognos Performance Management products, and generic system overview tools.  We will be adding new diagnostic tools often, so please come back to the site to explore what’s new.

These diagnostics are created to help you, so feedback on our current tools or ideas for new diagnostics will help us grow this library and provide you the tools you need to be more self-sufficient.

Downloading the Diagnostic Tools

Visit the Diagnostic Tools  page for more information and to download the zip file for the diagnostic you wish to run.

Cognos Diagnostic Tools in Action

So now you know a little more about Cognos Diagnostic Tools, I’m sure you are eager to try them out. In the following example we will review how the diagnostics are packaged, explore the value of the documentation that comes with each diagnostic, download Cognos 8 BI Health Check, run it, and look at the results.

Figure 1: Cognos Support Web Site – Finding the Diagnostic Tools Page

Once on the Diagnostic Tools page, you can explore the available diagnostics, browsing by product family or exploring the list of available diagnostics to familiarize yourself with the tools available.

Each diagnostic is associated with a product and has a brief description of the information the diagnostic retrieves. Select the diagnostic you want to run and proceed with the download. You will be prompted to log on to the Cognos Support Web site. Once you successfully logged on, you will need to accept the License Agreement, and then extract the content of the zip file to the folder of your choice.

Please check that Java Run Time ( JRE 1.4.x ) is in your PATH environment variable prior to running the diagnostics on Windows.

Let’s take a look now at the Cognos 8 BI Health Check Diagnostic.

When you download the Cognos 8 BI Health Check Diagnostic, you extract three files: the .jar file, batch file and the .pdf file – see Figure 2.

Figure 2: Cognos 8 Health Check Diagnostic Package

Each PDF file packaged with the diagnostics gives you detailed information about the product the diagnostic was developed for, steps on how to run the diagnostic, a summary of the information retrieved, as well as a detail list of properties, settings and files collected. See Figure 3.

Figure 3: Cognos 8 Health Check PDF File

Cognos 8 Health Check diagnostic gathers information about your system and checks if it is compliant with Cognos supported software environments. You can find the Cognos supported software environment for each version of Cognos product .

To run the Cognos 8 Health Check Diagnostic go to the folder you extracted the files to and double click on Execute_Cognos8_HealthCheck.bat. The following Dialog Box will be displayed. See Figure 4 – Cognos 8 BI Health Check Dialog Box. You can select the version of Cognos 8 BI, that you want the health check to run against, from the drop down list. Next, is a list of categories available to run the health check on. You will notice some are grayed out - these categories will be implemented in the near future. From the list of categories available today, you can either select all, or select only the categories that you are interested in.

Browse to or type the Cognos 8 install location. For the Database JDBC conformance, you will need to enter the Content Store user name and password.

Figure 4: Cognos 8 BI Health Check Dialog Box

Let’s run the Cognos 8 Health Check Diagnostic and take a look at the results.

When the diagnostic is finished, the "Diagnostic Finished" message is displayed in the DOS Command Prompt Window. The diagnostic results are presented to you in a TAB Formatted Dialog Box for interactive view, as well as a text file which you can view at any time. The result in the TAB Formatted Dialog Box is an easy way to identify categories for which the Cognos 8 Health Check Diagnostic reports versions of software not compliant with Cognos software environments.  A check mark "V" tells you that a particular category passed the health check verification. A red "X" is and indication that you might have an unsupported version of a particular 3rd party software installed, or not installed at all. A failure on software compliance does not always mean that this is the root of a particular problem with the product, but it can certainly give you information about system ready environments when you install a new version of Cognos 8 and can help you identify and troubleshoot differences between development and production environments.

As you visit each TAB, the icon changes to let you know that you already visited that particular category. See "Web Browser Support by Components" versus Office Connection tabs.

Figure 5: Cognos 8 BI Health Check Results – TAB Dialog Box

You can also view the same results by opening the Cognos 8 Health Check text results file from the Diagnostic Tools - View Results File. See Figure 6 for more details.  You can search for an entry you are interested in, view the file, attach the results to a case you logged with support or e-mail it with a particular request. The file name includes the timestamp for easy reference and comparison with later or earlier runs of the diagnostic.

By comparing the files you can identify changes in your environment.

Figure 6: Cognos 8 BI Health Check Results – Result File Text Format

Benefits of Cognos 8 Health Check Diagnostic

• Fast, accurate overview of your system and software compliance with Cognos 8 BI.
• Take a snapshot of your working, stable environment for future reference.
• Compare development, testing and production environments to identify differences and potential showstoppers.
• Proactively test your environment for a proof of concept project prior to completing an install and deployment.
• Attach the results file to a support case.
• Save time by using the diagnostic results during WebEx sessions and conference call as needed, to analyze your environment and find potential solutions.

Additional Resources Diagnostics Downloads - http://support.cognos.com/en/support/diagnostics/index.html Questions? Feedback? Email diagtool@ca.ibm.com