Check Network/Firewall Status using PowerShell

Working with Maximo, we have to deal with network/firewall all the time. I can spend a whole day telling you fun stories (or extremely frustrating experience) I had with IT/Network guys. But that's not the point. If you end up here, I guess you're having an issue with firewall. So below is a quick recap of my tricks:

- Ping: the first thing we try when we want to see if a server is accessible from our current machine. But don't jump to a conclusion too early if it shows the server is unreachable. Sometimes, the Network Admin has disabled ping response to enhance security. 

- Telnet: to check if a port is opened, we can use telnet from Windows Command console (e.g. telnet google.com 80). If it can be connected, means the target server is accessible on the specified port. But if it doesn't, first, make sure the server is listening on that port, before jumping to a conclusion that it's a Firewall issue. I made this mistake a few times, blaming the network, then it turned out it's Websphere/Maximo service is not running on the port that I assumed it should be running on

- PowerShell: in many cases, the server is not connected to the Internet, and Telnet is not installed, (and yes, you don't have permission to install new software either). We can use PowerShell to check network connectivity using the two commands below:

$connection = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient("google.com", 80)

Write-Host $connection.Connected

The first line will return some errors if it cannot connect to the server, like the screenshot below: 

 If the server is accessible via the provided IP and port, the 2nd line will return the status = Connected

Play around with Map control in Cognos Analytics

There’s been quite a bit of talk recently on the web about the new partnership with MapBox to deliver new map capabilities to Cognos Analytics (and there isn’t much talk about the discontinuation of support for ArcGIS in this new version). I decided to spend a bit more time to learn about the map functionality in this new Cognos version. The best way to get to know something is by doing it. So I cooked up some “real” requirements and tried to build a few dashboards.

The first one, I like to see whether a change in average temperature will affect the number of calls to fix break/leak issues related to water supply piping system, and whether a change in average rainfall will affect number of calls related to sewage/drainage systems. The data should be broken down to suburb and post-code level. Below is what I got:

For the second one, I like to compare the average planned vs actual labour hours spent on maintenance work, and the amount of time field workers spent to get to work location vs the amount of time spent on doing actual maintenance work. The purpose is to see whether there is a difference in remote areas and if it affects planned vs actual ratio. Below is what I got:

Overall, I am impressed with the ease of use, the responsiveness, and the level of interactivity of this new Map control in Dashboard. However, through this exercise, I found there are quite a number of limitations to this new map control:

• This map control is only available in Dashboard. With Report, and Active Report, a different version of Mapbox control, and older map controls are available. However, they are both a lot less interactive and much more limited in functionality.
• It only supports X/Y coordinates, thus, if your data is easting/northing, it needs to be converted to X/Y coordinates first.
• For high-lighting map regions, Australian Postcode is supported and is the lowest level of detail. High-lighting suburbs is not supported, the lowest level of detail is council/city regions and the region names must match with the Mapbox pre-defined list. Thus, some level of data cleansing must be done if the region names in your data doesn't match exactly with the city/region name in this list.
• It is possible to upload custom maps to MapBox to achieve more refined areas, however, there was an issue with MapBox changing the way to manage Layout ID. The issue is only corrected with newer versions of Cognos (from 11.1.x). Thus, this custom map function doesn’t work with older versions (including v11.0.11 which is bundled with Maximo)

Framework Manager crashes when creating Project

I tried to create a new Framework Manager project to build a package which I will join some big Maximo tables (Assets, Workorder etc.) with some general geo/demographical data I pulled from the Web. Framework Manager kept crashing with this annoying error. After some quick search on the web, I realized the issue with FM crashing is not uncommon, and there can be a thousand reasons for that. To be honest, from the perspective of a software developer, most of these are simple and stupid exceptions which should be caught or fixed easily by the Cognos R&D team. Good software should give the end-users useful error messages about what they did wrong. But anyway, this is not another post to complain, just a quick note on another crash scenario so you can avoid:

My top 3 beginner gotchas with Cognos 11

Working with Maximo, perhaps we all have the same frustration with the constant changes by IBM marketing team who work hard and are very successfully in their attempt to confuse us. The most visible problem is the continuous changes to their website which essentially breaks any links from external sources pointing to their KB pages which are more than a few years old. When I started with Cognos, I realized they have brought it (the confusion part) to the next level with this product. Below are the top 3 gotchas that I had to learn the hard way when I started with this product:

Gotcha #1: Cognos Business Intelligence vs Cognos Analytics

From Version 11, IBM started calling it Cognos Analytics. Previous versions were called Cognos Business Intelligence. This does not seem like a big problem when scratching the surface. But as a beginner, I was totally lost when searching for technical information from the web. Initially, when I read something that mentions Cognos BI or Cognos Analytics, to me it meant the same thing “Cognos”. In many cases, I didn’t realize, when talking about changing behaviors or different functionalities, if people mentioned something is available in Cognos Analytics or something is not possible in Cognos BI, they were talking about different versions. I learned this the hard way and thought how much trouble it could have saved me if I knew about this sooner.

Setup Cognos 11 to send email with Gmail (2020)

When I tried to to setup Cognos 11 to send notification via Gmail, it failed because Google blocked access from Unsecured App. Even if I tried to turn off this option and tried again, it still failed because Google automatically turns this setting off again. So I had to create an App Password for my Gmail account to make it works following the steps below:

Step 1: Configure Gmail account

• Log in to my Gmail account, go to “Manage your Google Account page”, then go to “Security” section
• Enable 2-Step Verification
• Once 2-Step Verification is enabled, the App Passwords option will be visible under the 2-Step verification option