Upgrading to Cognos Analytics

Every process can be broken down to a methodology.  After having help many customers upgrade to Cognos Analytics, I have established a repeatable process. As anecdotal as it may sound, I will include some specific facts that may help you in your journey. The steps include

1. Planning the Upgrade
2. Environment Setup
3. Establishing a Baseline
4. Content Migration
5. Validation and Remediation
6. Go Live

This session will cover the Planning phase.

What to Migrate

For many years there have been two basic approaches to migrate content from a previous release.

1. Lift & Shift
2. Consolidate & Optimize

In order to determine what is the best approach for your environment you really need to consider what is important to your users. The Lift & Shift method implies that everything is important and everything needs to be migrated.  If the number of reports is relatively small, then including everything is likely a reasonable approach.  However if you have a large number of reports then perhaps a Consolidate & Optimize approach is more likely to succeed. Chances are that if you have used Cognos for a long time it will be more likely to have duplicates and possible opportunities to consolidate. Additionally, there may be some content that is similar and with better understanding of requirements or by using some of the advanced capabilities of the authoring tool some reports can be optimized. The challenge with Compress & Optimize is the time to deliver and the resources required. Perhaps a Hybrid or Batch approach is more suitable. In other words, maybe migrating contents in small groups makes more sense for your situation. This would give you the opportunity to control the schedule and resources required.

There are tools available that can inventory your environment and provide some level of detail to help make these decisions. Important factors to consider are the total number of reports and complexity of those reports. Using a complexity rating of all your reports can help guide possible remediation estimates. Some of these tools can also help identify duplicates which can in some cases lead to significant reduction in report count. These tools include the Audit Report, Cognos Toolkit which is available from Cognos AVP or Expert Services and MotioCI.

Identifying what needs to be moved is the key step in the planning phase. Confirm that the reports are needed. Confirm the reports still work, if not fix them in the source environment (before migration). Consider archiving reports that are not defined as required for migration, that way the asset can be recovered should it be discovered after the migration as still needed.  Limiting the scope to a manageable migration will help you succeed.

Testing Strategy

After you have defined the list of reports that will be migrated you need to determine what needs to be tested.  Do you need to test all of your reports or is there a sample set that can certify the upgrade?  Engage your users to define their level of comfort in the migration process. 

What scenarios need to be tested?  Are there multiple use cases for a report that need to be tested? Do these reports have multiple parameters that need to be verified. Are there security requirements that would require multiple test cases?

Define the test cases. Collecting the parameters required can be time consuming. Some testing tools can collect parameters from your environment to automatically build these test cases.  Both Cognos Life Cycle Manager (LCM) and MotioCI as an example will gather report parameters from previous executions.  Make sure your environment has either saved output or run history in the audit database to automate this process. If those parameters cannot be collected automatically you may need to manually add them to the testing tools test cases or create report views in your environment to manage the testing.

How long will the testing take and what is that impact on your testing? Most environment will struggle to freeze all report development during this upgrade process. To address this you can either migrate and test in batches or manage the changes. Your governance process might help mitigate changes during the migration or if you have installed a tool like MotioCI it can also monitor for “stale” reports, reports that have changed during the testing cycle.

Testing tools as of this writing only support Reports. Cognos Analytics has consolidated the studios to dashboards and reports, all others are considered Legacy Studios. Of course, there are new components within the Cognos Analytics environment such as Exploration, Stories and Notebooks but those are not a consideration for this writing as we are addressing a migration from pre-Cognos Analytics (Cognos 11.x).

Other Things to Consider

Factors that complicate a migration include making multiple changes in one pass.  Some of those include:

• Migration to Cloud
• Migrating from CQM to DQM
• Changing the OS of the environment
• Changing the Interactive Flag
• Changing the Content Store database vendor
• Changing the database vendor of a datasource

The key message here is to keep the migration simple and get to Cognos Analytics first then evaluate other changes.  After having migrated many customers to CA the success rate has been very high averaging less than 1% remediation if the test plan is kept simple. 

More on what to expect during a migration in a future blog, stay tuned.