About Cognos

Cognos is a web-based suite of tools from IBM that offers a full range of business intelligence capabilities including reports, analysis, dashboards, scorecards, mobile BI and more.  Cognos is Purdue's primary BI tool and is used to access many of the university's BI environments including Student ODS/EDW, the Finance and HR data marts, and GM AIMS.

Cognos Access

Cognos Licensing levels are as follows:

• Consumer - users are licensed to consume existing or standard reports as needed using the Cognos web portal.  Users with this license generally consume existing reports to complete their daily tasks and are not required to know the data at a detailed level.  Basic data training is required for this role.
• Authoring - the report writing tool used to build reports.

Click here to learn how to request a Cognos license.

Data Access

For student data, see the Student ODS/EDW access page for steps on requesting access.

For business data, see the HR/FI access page for steps on requesting access.

Maintenance Window

The standard Cognos maintenance window is every Saturday from 4:00PM to 12:00AM. Additional outages will be communicated.