IBM Cognos Embedded — Create Dashboards without coding
Dashboards provide the overall view of the system. They allow an organisation to quickly drill down on key parameters and assess performance of any system. Dashboards are used to represent and analyse business objectives and as such our dash-boarding and reporting infrastructure should allow rapid development without coding to facilitate the business users. With that objective at the forefront, IBM developed IBM Cognos analytics. It is a business intelligence tool which has all the features from creating custom dashboards to asking the bot for visualisation recommendations as well as intuitive and simplified access to your data.
In this blog we will create dashboard using Cognos embedded along with Watson studio on IBM Cloud. This integration of IBM cloud and Cognos analytics helps data scientist and Business analysts to collaborate on same ecosystem.
We will use open source data on World Happiness report from Kaggle in .csv format. It is clean data and do not require any pre processing. If you are taking data from database you may need pre-process it before proceeding. You can easily pre-process your data and build model in Watson studio and display results in Cognos ecosystem.
Creating dashboard by Cognos Embedded-
You need an IBM cloud account for developing dashboard with Cognos embedded. You can sign up for free on IBM Cloud.
Step 1 — Sign up for IBM Cloud account — https://cloud.ibm.com/
Step 2 — After logging in IBM Cloud, search for Cognos Embedded in the search bar and click on the IBM Cognos Dashboard Embedded service
Step 3 — Choose the plan as per your need, for this tutorial, we have selected the lite plan which is free, click on Create. Note service name for future reference. Click on IBM Cloud on upper left corner
Step 4— For launching Cognos Embedded we will require Watson studio. To get Watson studio type in search bar “Watson Studio” and click on Create. Choose plan according to your need.
After clicking on Create, you will be redirected to Watson studio homepage. Click on Get started.
Step 5 — Click on New Project and you will be redirected to Create a project page. We have selected create an empty project. Provide the name to the project and click on Create
Step 6 — Once you create a project in Watson studio you will be directly to project home page, click on add to Project and choose data. Drag and drop your data in .csv format.
Now we need to connect the IBM Cognos Embedded service that we created in step 3 to Watson studio. Click on Add to project and select Dashboard and name the dashboard. Click on Associate a Cognos Dashboard Embedded service instance with your project. This step is performed to connect the service created in step 3 to Watson studio.
Select the service name as noted in step 3. Click on the service name and reload and click Create. Now your set up is complete and you are all set to create cool dashboards.
Step 7 — Click on the project name created in Step 5 from Watson studio homepage. You can see the uploaded data and Dashboard created, click on the dashboard created in step 6 under Dashboards dropdown.
Step 8 — Select a template and connect data to your dashboard
Step 9 — Create amazing dashboards by dragging and dropping the visualisation options you like. Share public link of the dashboards with your friends and colleagues.
Dashboard on World Happiness Report. This Dashboard shows World Happiness and its measuring parameters. Heap map is selected over world map indicating Health Life expectancy.
Happy sharing and designing.
This blog has been written in collaboration with Shivhare Himanshu(AI/ML expert) :)
