IBM Cognos: Understanding tenant wise utilization of your BI Assets for Billing and Provisioning

In one of my previous blog, we saw how to set up IBM Cognos BI security using Java based Custom Authentication Provider and how to set up multi-tenancy environment in IBM Cognos BI using Custom Java Provider. We’ll use this work as base for the activity steps mentioned in this blog so it is highly recommended to go thru previous blog before proceeding further.

Now let’s take it one step forward. Suppose you have deployed Cognos BI in cloud environment for multiple customers by enabling multitenancy. Now the question is: How to understand BI asset/infrastructure utilization (A) for billing purpose (B) for provisioning purpose. Here in this blog we try to answer it. Now one way of answering it is to enable Auditing. To see detailed steps on how to set-up auditing in Multitenant Environment of IBM Cognos BI environment please refer my previous blog. As you can see there its purpose is to provide access to following information in the form of ready Cognos reports which can be customized and shared with customers.

·         Capacity planning

·         Planning down time by identifying quiet periods.

·         Justifying additional infrastructure requirements.

·         Tenant specific usage and activity tracking

·         Support for Pay-as-use model

·         Licensing conformance reporting

·         Performance monitoring

·         Identifying unused content

So the feature (introduced in Cognos BI 10.2.1) which we are going to talk about today is not going to replace Audit feature but to complement it by providing object level details.

Creating and running content store utilization tasks

You can determine how many instances of each object type users from your tenants have in the content store and the amount of space that those instances are taking. You can also determine more detailed information, such as the size of every object.

This information can be used for billing and provisioning purposes. For example, billing decisions can be based on the instance count of particular object types, such as reports. Provisioning decisions can be made by determining which tenants should be moved to a different IBM Cognos instance because of the amount of space that they are using.

To get this information with the help of content store utilization tasks set for tenants. Once these tasks are created, you can run them on demand, at a scheduled time, or based on a trigger. The resulting .csv files can be used as data sources to create reports in IBM Cognos BI. Let’s create a utilization task for one of our two tenants – Customer – A.

1)     Go to Multitenancy tab In IBM Cognos Administration and Click the “create content utilization” iconin the tenant Actions drop-down menu.

2)     Specify the task name, and optionally a description and screen tip. For the Tenant property, click Set to select the tenant ID that you want to be associated with this task. If you do not select the tenant at this point, the task will be created with the current session tenant ID.

3)     Select the tenant or tenants that you want to include in this content utilization task by using the arrows icons to move the tenants from the Available box to the Selected box.

4)     In the Options section, specify how to save the information to the log files after this task is run.

a.      Under File, if you select ‘One for all tenants’, the information for all tenants is saved in a single file. If you select ‘One per tenant’, the information for each tenant is saved in a separate file.

b.      Under Granularity, if you select ‘By object type and tenant’, a high-level summary of information about each tenant is saved. The summary includes an instance count and the total size of each object type in the content store grouped by tenant. If you select All objects, a detailed summary of information about each object in the content store is saved. The summary includes the object tenantID, name, storeID, parentStoreID, and size.

5)     To run the task now or later, click ‘Save and run once’ or ‘Save and schedule’ respectively. Creation of task is over.

6)     The new task ‘UtilA’ appears on the Configuration tab, in Content Administration. You can modify or run the task from here.

The log files that result from running the content store utilization tasks are saved in the logs directory that is specified in IBM Cognos Configuration with the following names:

• cmUtilization_date_stamp.csv when the One for all tenants option was used.
• cmUtilization_date_stamp_tenant_ID.csv when the One per tenant option was used.

  

 

Based on the resource consumption and asset utilization data some formula for billing and provisioning can be planned and shared with customers.

References - 

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2.1 Administration and Security Guide 
Hint: On Windows Cognos server you'll find it here - C:/Program Files/IBM/cognos/c10_64/webcontent/documentation/en/ug_cra.pdf