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 I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.
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 Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL. Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues. Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems. Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem. 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 Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can do a better job in actively managing (as opposed to monitoring) non-Oracle IT components including non-Oracle database, middleware, and storage. The UI is less responsive and sometimes slow and the user experience could certainly be improved. There is also an issue with positioning as other Oracle products sometimes come with their own versions of management console so it is hard to justify paying for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control separately or as a new attachment. 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 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 wanted to give it a 10 but the heavily loaded solution makes it slow to load and refresh pages. Even bouncing the OEM Cloud Control takes around 10 mins which is quite long.
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 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 Since OEM Cloud Control comes free with Enterprise Edition, we have mostly worked on OEM Cloud Control. I did have my fair share of experience with
DBArtisan . It's good and lighter than OEM Cloud Control. It sort of removes your need to even go to SQLPLUS command line most of the time. But it is way behind OEM Cloud Control in terms of features.
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 Freed up DBAs and SAs by automating much of their antiquated manual processes. We are limited by our own desire to use and learn all of the features within OEM. Read full review ScreenShots