8/9/2016
Are your IBM Cognos BI reports taking a long time to run? Do you have certain reports that are scheduled to be sent to a certain department? Are you looking at adding another Cognos BI server and want to limit your PVU rating? Depending on how your system is set up, you may want to control how reports are distributed through the use of Cognos BI dispatcher.
Simply put, the dispatcher is the entry point for Cognos BI service requests sent by a web server or other software. The dispatcher handles routing and balances the load of users. You can have more than one dispatcher and as such, each dispatcher configures to each instance of the content manager.
Options for IBM Cognos BI Dispatcher
You can set up the dispatchers to distribute reports based on user group, roles, or package. In other words, financial reports based on an income statement package can be directed to be run through the “finance server dispatcher”, sales report through sales dispatcher and so on. Furthermore, you can also set up the rule so that anytime any sales report is run, without regard to package, it can go to a specific dispatcher.
Why does this matter? Depending on your licensing structure, setting up dispatchers with appropriate size hardware could limit your PVU expense. You also have the option of setting up the dispatchers to handle x’s of the process requests or set them equally. These are commonly referred to as load balancing.
One area of importance is tuning the dispatchers.
Below are some of the options available to tune:
Load Balancing
Balance Dispatcher Load with In-Progress Load Factor
Setting the dispatcher load balancing property to cluster compatible mod
Balancing the data movement task execution
Usage Peak Period
Maximum Number of Processes and Connections
Affinity Connection
Queue Time Limit
Maximum Execution Time
You can find all of the information on Cognos BI dispatcher and PVU in the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Version 10.2.2 Administration and Security guide.
For troubleshooting your Cognos BI dispatcher, head on over to the IBM Cognos BI Dispatcher Diagnostic to download a tool help you out.
Setting up a dispatcher is confusing. Add in the licensing aspect and it can be downright maddening. Lodestar Solutions is here to help answer any questions you have regarding dispatchers, tuning, licensing impact or all the above. We have experts in each area that can make this process simple and possibly SAVE YOU MONEY on your licensing additions or support renewal! Please contact us at services@lodestarsolutions.com for more information.
Finally, to learn more about PVU licensing, check out a very informational blog called What the Heck is an IBM Cognos PVU? that is definitely worth the read.