Set up on-premises IBM Cognos Analytics access

Who can do this?

You need access to a machine that can run Docker on-premises. You also need your IBM Cognos Analytics instance details, including credentials.

In some cases you can't expose your IBM Cognos Analytics instance for Atlan to crawl and ingest metadata. For example, this may happen when security requirements restrict access to sensitive, mission-critical data.

In such cases you may want to decouple the extraction of metadata from its ingestion in Atlan. This approach gives you full control over your resources and metadata transfer to Atlan.

Prerequisites

To extract metadata from your on-premises IBM Cognos Analytics instance, use Atlan's cognos-extractor tool.

Did you know?

Atlan uses exactly the same cognos-extractor behind the scenes when it connects to IBM Cognos Analytics in the cloud.

Install Docker Compose

Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running applications composed of many Docker containers. (Any guesses where the name came from? 😉)

To install Docker Compose:

1. Install Docker
2. Install Docker Compose

Did you know?

These instructions are enough even if you are completely new to Docker and Docker Compose. However, you can also walk through the Get started with Docker Compose tutorial if you want to learn Docker Compose basics first.

Get cognos-extractor tool

To get the cognos-extractor tool:

1. Raise a support ticket to get the link to the latest version.

2. Download the image using the link provided by support.

3. Load the image to the server you'll use to crawl IBM Cognos Analytics:

   sudo docker load -i /path/to/cognos-extractor-master.tar

Get compose file

Atlan provides you with a Docker compose file for the cognos-extractor tool.

To get the compose file:

1. Download the latest compose file.
2. Save the file to an empty directory on the server you'll use to access your on-premises IBM Cognos Analytics instance.
3. The file is docker-compose.yaml.

Define IBM Cognos Analytics connections

The structure of the compose file includes three main sections:

• x-templates contains configuration fragments. Ignore this section and don't make any changes to it.
• services is where you define your IBM Cognos Analytics connections.
• volumes contains mount information. Ignore this section as well and don't make any changes to it.

Define services

For each on-premises IBM Cognos Analytics instance, define an entry under services in the compose file.

Each entry has the following structure:

services:
  cognos-example:
    <<: *extract
    environment:
      <<: *cognos-defaults
      EXCLUDE_FILTER: '{}'
      INCLUDE_FILTER: '{}'
    volumes:
      - ./output/cognos-example:/output/process

• Replace cognos-example with the name of your connection.
• <<: *extract tells the cognos-extractor tool to run.
• environment contains all parameters for the tool.
  • EXCLUDE_FILTER and INCLUDE_FILTER - specify a regular expression to filter assets to exclude or include, respectively. For example, to exclude a folder with the ID 76471ff1e0f02c7d3349 in team_content, configure the EXCLUDE_FILTER as follows - '{"team_content": {"76471ff1e0f02c7d3349": {}}'.
• volumes specifies where to store results. In this example, the extractor stores results in the ./output/cognos-example folder on the local file system.

You can add as many IBM Cognos Analytics connections as you want.

Did you know?

Docker's documentation describes the services format in more detail.

Provide credentials

To define the credentials for your IBM Cognos Analytics connections, provide an IBM Cognos Analytics configuration file.

The IBM Cognos Analytics configuration is a .ini file with the following format:

[CognosConfig]
host=http://cognos-application-host-example.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com
port=9300
namespace=CognosEx
# possible values are "basic_auth", "okta_auth" and "api_key"
auth_type=basic_auth

# Only required when auth_type = basic_auth
[BasicAuth]
[email protected]
password=<password>

# Only required when auth_type = okta_auth
[OKTAAuth]
[email protected]
password=<password>

# Only required when auth_type = api_key
[APIKeyAuth]
key=<yourAPIkey>

Secure credentials

Using local files

warning

If you decide to keep IBM Cognos Analytics credentials in plaintext files, restrict access to the directory and the compose file. For extra security, use Docker secrets to store the sensitive passwords.

To specify the local files in your compose file:

secrets:
  cognos_config:
    file: ./cognos.ini

warning

This secrets section is at the same top-level as the services section described earlier. It's not a sub-section of the services section.

Using Docker secrets

To create and use Docker secrets:

1. Store the IBM Cognos Analytics configuration file:

   sudo docker secret create cognos_config path/to/cognos.ini

2. At the top of your compose file, add a secrets element to access your secret:

   secrets:
     cognos_config:
       external: true
       name: cognos_config

   • The name must match the value from the docker secret create command in the previous step.
   • Once stored as a Docker secret, you can remove the local IBM Cognos Analytics configuration file.

3. Within the service section of the compose file, add a new secrets element and specify the name of the secret within your service to use it.

Example

The following example explains the configuration in detail:

secrets:
  cognos_config:
    external: true
    name: cognos_config

x-templates:
  # ...

services:
  cognos-example:
    <<: *extract
    environment:
      <<: *cognos-defaults
      EXCLUDE_FILTER: '{}'
      INCLUDE_FILTER: '{}'
    volumes:
      - ./output/cognos-example:/output/process
    secrets:
      - cognos_config

1. In this example, the secrets at the top of the file (you can also define them at the bottom) reference an external Docker secret created using the docker secret create command.
2. The name of this service is cognos-example. You can use any meaningful name you want.
3. The <<: *cognos-defaults sets the connection type to IBM Cognos Analytics.
4. The EXCLUDE_FILTER and INCLUDE_FILTER tells the extractor to filter folders.
5. The ./output/cognos-example:/output/process line tells the extractor where to store results. In this example, the extractor stores results in the ./output/cognos-example directory on the local file system. Output the extracted metadata for different connections in separate directories.
6. The secrets section within services tells the extractor which secrets to use for this service. Each of these refers to the name of a secret listed at the beginning of the compose file.