Dispatchers and Services

The dispatcher is the entry point for IBM® Cognos® service requests sent by a Web server gateway or other software. The dispatcher handles the routing requests and balances the load of user requests to the various IBM Cognos services.

You can have more than one dispatcher in your IBM Cognos environment. In such distributed installations one dispatcher is configured for every instance of the Content Manager or Application Tier Components that are installed and configured in your environment.

After you install and configure IBM Cognos software, one dispatcher is available on each computer by default. Each dispatcher has a set of associated services, listed in the following table.

IBM Cognos services

After you install and configure IBM Cognos BI, one dispatcher is available on each computer by default. Each dispatcher has a set of associated services, listed in the following table.

Table 1. IBM Cognos services
Service	Purpose
Agent service	Runs agents. If the conditions for an agent are met when the agent runs, the agent service asks the monitor service to run the tasks.
Annotation service	Enables the addition of commentary to reports via the IBM Cognos Workspace. These comments persist across versions of the report.
Batch report service	Manages background requests to run reports and provides output on behalf of the monitor service.
Content Manager cache service	Enhances the overall system performance and Content Manager scalability by caching frequent query results in each dispatcher.
Content Manager service	Performs object manipulation functions in the content store, such as add, query, update, delete, move, and copy Performs content store management functions, such as import and export
Data movement service	Manages the execution of data movement tasks in IBM Cognos BI. Data movement tasks, such as Builds and JobStreams, are created in Data Manager Designer and published to IBM Cognos BI.
Delivery service	Sends emails to an external SMTP server on behalf of other services, such as the report service, job service, agent service, or data integration service
Event management service	Creates, schedules, and manages event objects that represent reports, jobs, agents, content store maintenance, deployment imports and exports, and metrics
Graphics service	Produces graphics on behalf of the Report service. Graphics can be generated in 4 different formats: Raster, Vector, Microsoft Excel XML or PDF.
Human task service	Enables the creation and management of human tasks. A human task such as report approval can be assigned to individuals or groups on an ad hoc basis or by any of the other services.
Index data service	Provides basic full-text functions for storage and retrieval of terms and indexed summary documents.
Index search service	Provides search and drill-through functions, including lists of aliases and examples.
Index update service	Provides write, update, delete, and administration functions.
Job service	Runs jobs by signaling the monitor service to run job steps in the background. Steps include reports, other jobs, import, exports, and so on.
Log service	Records log messages generated by the dispatcher and other services. The log service can be configured to record log information in a file, a database, a remote log server, Windows Event Viewer, or a UNIX system log. The log information can then be analyzed by customers or by Cognos Software Services, including: security events system and application error information selected diagnostic information
Metadata service	Provides support for data lineage information displayed in Cognos Viewer, Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio. Lineage information includes information such as data source and calculation expressions.
Metric Studio service	Provides the Metric Studio user interface for monitoring and entering performance information
Migration service	Manages the migration from IBM Cognos Series 7 to IBM Cognos BI.
Mobile service	Manages activities related to IBM Cognos Mobile client: Transforms Cognos Business Intelligence reports and analyses for mobile consumption. Compresses Cognos BI report and analysis content for fast distribution over-the-air to the mobile devices and access from those devices. Pushes report and analysis content to the mobile devices. Facilitates incoming and outgoing report-related and analysis-related requests between the mobile device and the environment to search, browse, or run reports. Synchronizes the mobile content store on the server with the mobile database on the mobile device. Translates Cognos BI Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages into wireless-friendly messages. Communicates with the mobile device.
Monitor service	Manages the monitoring and execution of tasks that are scheduled, submitted for execution at a later time, or run as a background task Assigns a target service to handle a scheduled task. For example, the monitor service may ask the batch report service to run a report, the job service to run a job, or the agent service to run an agent. Creates history objects within the content manager and manages failover and recovery for executing entries
Planning administration console service	Manages communication with the Contributor Administration Console.
Planning data service	Manages communications for real-time reporting from Contributor plan data in IBM Cognos BI.
Planning job service	Manages communications with the Planning Job Server subsystem.
Planning web service	Manages communications with Contributor Web and Contributor Add-in for Excel users.
PowerPlay® service	Manages requests to run PowerPlay reports.
Presentation service	Transforms generic XML responses from another service into output format, such as HTML or PDF Provides display, navigation, and administration capabilities in IBM Cognos Connection
Query service	Manages Dynamic Query requests and returns the result to the requesting batch or report service.
Report data service	Manages the transfer of report data between IBM Cognos BI and applications that consume the data, such as IBM Cognos BI for Microsoft Office and IBM Cognos Mobile.
Report service	Manages interactive requests to run reports and provides output for a user in IBM Cognos Connection or a studio.
Repository service	Manages requests to retrieve archived report output from an archive repository or object store.
System service	Defines the Business Intelligence Bus API-compliant service used to obtain application-wide IBM Cognos BI configuration parameters. It also provides methods that normalize and validate locale strings and map locale strings to locales supported by your application.
Visualization Gallery service	Enables the Visualization Gallery in Report Studio.