analytics

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Cognos Audit Logging: Demystified

Audit logging is one of many important administrative features available with IBM Cognos BI. However, it tends to confuse ibm cognos administrators with various levels and tables it has for it. For ibm cognos 10.1 (it applies the same to ibm cognos 8 except the grey ones), there's a chapter available in redbook for understanding Cognos Audit Logging.

The redbook (page 503 onward/ Chapter 10.5 Auditing), lists setting up audit db, various audit tables and their definitions and the effect each audit logging level would have in general sense. Although, this definition and effect of levels is generalized in Cognos environment sense, you could set up audit logging higher for a particular component to audit its usage.


Audit database table definitions

Table name

Description

COGIPF_ACTION

Stores information about operations performed on objects

COGIPF_AGENTBUILD

Stores information about agent mail delivery

COGIPF_AGENTRUN

Stores information about agent activity including tasks and delivery

COGIPF_ANNOTATIONSERVICE

Stores audit information about annotation service operations

COGIPF_EDITQUERY

Stores information about query runs

COGIPF_HUMANTASKSERVICE

Stores audit information about human task service operations (tasks and corresponding task states)

COGIPF_HUMANTASKSERVICE_DETAIL

Stores additional details about human task service operations (not necessarily required for every audit entry, for example, notification details and human role details)

COGIPF_NATIVEQUERY

Stores information about queries that IBM Cognos software makes to other components

COGIPF_PARAMETER

Stores parameter information logged by a component

COGIPF_RUNJOB

Stores information about job runs

COGIPF_RUNJOBSTEP

Stores information about job step runs

COGIPF_RUNREPORT

Stores information about report runs

COGIPF_THRESHOLD_VIOLATIONS

Stores information about threshold violations for system metrics

COGIPF_USERLOGON

Stores user logon and logoff information

COGIPF_VIEWREPORT

Stores information about report view requests



IBM Cognos audit and logging levels

System activity type

Minimal

Basic

Request

Trace

Full

System and service startup and shutdown, runtime errors

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

User account management and runtime usage

Y

Y

Y

Y

User requests

Y

Y

Y

Y

Service requests and responses

Y

Y

All requests to all components with their parameter values

Y

Y

Other queries to IBM Cognos components (native query)

Y