IBM Cognos for BI Reporting [closed]

I would like to setup a business intelligence dashboard that reports on current system health. How difficult is Cognos in terms of setup, and when it comes to developing the dashboard does it use its own proprietary scripting language?

My company has just installed Cognos as a BI reporting tool. Setup wasn't all to easy and required us to get a outside consultant to help implement a dashboard. That being said there are Cognos classes you can take that cover everything from daily usage to actual development.

Personally it would be a lot easier, and cheaper, for me to create a custom dashboard interface using the .NET stack. My guess is that if you talk to a Cognos developer they would say the same about developing within Cognos.

my two cents

We have implemented Cognos BI here at UST. We don't really use it for dashboarding system health. We use it for reporting against our ERP database (Banner). Cognos is designed to report against databses. IBM does not at last check officially support reporting against MySQL. If you are not actively databasing your server stats making a dashboard with Cognos will be very challenging. It doesn't so much have a scripting language as a visual style builder.

Setting up Cognos BI is a non trivial task. It is very challenging to get set up the first time. Maintenance is pretty easy once it's up and running but that's a long time coming. Setting up dashboards, also challenging as stated by jdiaz.

If your company already has Cognos BI implemented then creating a dashboard of system stats probably wouldn't be that difficult, provided you have someone there with dashboarding experience and your stats in a database.

I do work in a shop with a 5 person Cognos BI team and we don't use it for our system monitoring. We use BigBrother and are moving to Xymon this fall. However there are products out there that designed for dash boarding system stats for example Xymon formerly Hobbit or Nagios or Cacti.