Likelihood to Recommend Our first and most basic scenario was to automatize the creation and publication/sharing of business reports that used to be created manually by employees throughout our organization. Using Cognos for that first use case worked well. The advanced analytics functionalities we used on the aggregated data were also as expected. However, the user interface is not always intuitive, and there is a steep learning curve, so I would recommend Cognos only to large organizations where there is a need for the most advanced functionalities (AI analysis/prediction).
Read full review Logi Composer is the best of the product range that Logi Analytics offers; Logi Info is, in my mind, a terrible experience and should be discontinued. Logi Info is not a BI tool and many CEOs and product managers believe it is. Instead, it is a tool for web developers to create IIS apps with a library of BI-type components, and with everything else having to be hand-coded in JavaScript and CSS. Maybe this was cool back in the early 2000s when Logi Info came about, but today I'd recommend using Visual Studio, C#, .NET, and finding a NuGet package for your visualisations if you wanted to go the route of making your own web app. This said, where it is suited is if you have a burning desire to make a stand-alone IIS-based web application and you don't need or want to leverage any existing skills in .NET or PHP or other frameworks/languages. Instead, you want to use the Logi Info XML-based BI widgets and you're happy to make something quick without needing it to look really awesome.
Read full review Pros We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios. Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis. Has mobile application which works seamless. Read full review Clear/Concise view of data. Easily intuitive, amazing drill down capability, fully user configurable panels and dashboards. Self-Service is such a powerful tool for facilities that want to create/design their own reports/dashboards, it's instantly recognized as being very powerful and agile. Logi software makes the designer realize that they should think outside the box and not stick with "it's how we have always done it limitation". It allows you to be very creative. Read full review Cons Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data. Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support. It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration. Read full review It is not always intuitive to incorporate JavaScript into Logi Info. The tools are all available, but the process requires multiple resource in translating between Logi and JavaScript. The toolbox is too vast for Logi to provide a 'quick implementation' or 'quick start guide'. There are so many tools that Logi expects the client to determine which fit their use case. There are purchasable 'Professional Services' options for implementation, but without these, the toolset is almost too big. Read full review Likelihood to Renew For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
Read full review Logi Analytics is a great solution if you need just the user interface. However there are other tools stronger at the overall data flow which include a user interface as part of their product.
Read full review Usability We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Read full review I am giving 9 rating because the Logi Info still needs to improve on the tutorials part and make it easy for the beginners. Otherwise, it's a very good analytics tool which offers more than 20 types of visualization. It's predictive analysis feature and easy to embed with technologies make it stand out in the market.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Read full review Performance Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
Read full review Support Rating Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Read full review The support process is bit slow and has a good scope improvement but overall it's good as team is very supportive. They generally take 1-2 days time to respond emails sent to them but some times a delay is also expected. Overall, I did not face any major issues using the service.
Read full review In-Person Training Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
Read full review Online Training The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In the past Management had used Excel and
Workiva capabilities to create the reporting dashboards that were being used to make decisions. Since switching to IBM Cognos Analytics the Company has been much more efficient and decision making has been streamlined. IBM Cognos Analytics was chosen due to its reputation and data visualization capabilities and neither have been wrong.
Read full review Logi gave us the flexibility we needed to meet the configurable nature of our product and for the need to create custom reports. Other products did not allow flexbility to generate reports via script as was one of our primary requirements.
Read full review Scalability The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
Read full review Return on Investment High ROI with well designed solutions. Supported by scalable deployment, robust security model and ability to create valuable content. High ROI where well designed data models can be deployed with a common metadata layer to a variety of users and use cases. High ROI in an environment that includes a variety of vendors and best of breed products within the overall platform Read full review By embedding Logi in our solution and using the Logi Self-Service Module we can provide this flexibility to our users without requiring custom development work for each new request. We succeeded in developing embedded self-service analytics at scale with a combination of Logi analytics as front-end and a Cassandra data lake with Spark aggregation algorithms as back-end. We analyze the insurance industry and need to replicate different data formats across hundreds of databases to support multi-tenant (customer) BI reports and "ad hoc" data review on millions or hundreds of millions of records per customer. Read full review ScreenShots Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) Screenshots