Crawl IBM Cognos Analytics

Once you have configured the IBM Cognos Analytics permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and IBM Cognos Analytics.

To crawl metadata from IBM Cognos Analytics, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select source

To select IBM Cognos Analytics as your source:

1. In the top right of any screen in Atlan, navigate to +New and click New Workflow.
2. From the Marketplace page, click IBM Cognos Analytics Assets. 
3. In the right panel, click Setup Workflow.

Provide credentials

Choose your extraction method:

• In Direct extraction, Atlan connects to your database and crawls metadata directly.
• In Offline extraction, you need to first extract metadata yourself and make it available in S3.

Direct extraction method

To enter your IBM Cognos Analytics credentials:

1. For Host Name, enter the hostname of your IBM Cognos Analytics instance.
2. For Port, enter the port number of your IBM Cognos Analytics instance.
3. For Authentication, select the method you configured when setting up the IBM Cognos Analytics access permissions:
   • For Basic, enter the Username and Password you configured for the new user.
   • For API Key, enter the Username and API Key you configured for the new user.
   • For OKTA, enter the Username and Password you configured for the new user in OKTA.
4. For Namespace, enter the name of the namespace where you created the new user.
5. Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to IBM Cognos Analytics.
6. Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Offline extraction method

Atlan supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from IBM Cognos Analytics. This method uses Atlan's cognos-extractor tool to fetch metadata. You need to first extract the metadata yourself and then make it available in S3.

To enter your bucket details:

1. For Bucket name, enter the name of your S3 bucket.
2. For Bucket prefix, enter the S3 prefix under which all the metadata files exist. These include output/cognos-example/contents/0/result-0.json, output/cognos-example/contents-details/0/result-0.json, and similar JSON files under the same prefix.
3. (Optional) For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
4. When complete, at the bottom of the screen, click Next.

Configure connection

To complete the IBM Cognos Analytics connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.

2. (Optional) To change the users who are able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.

   warning

   If you don't specify any user or group, no one can manage the connection, not even admins.

3. Navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next to proceed.

Configure crawler

Before running the IBM Cognos Analytics crawler, you can further configure it.

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

• To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Folders. (Defaults to all assets if none are specified.)
• To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Folders. (Defaults to no assets if none are specified.)

Did you know?

If an asset appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

Run crawler

To run the IBM Cognos Analytics crawler, after completing the steps in the previous sections:

• To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
• To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule & Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, the assets appear on Atlan's asset page! 🎉