Cognos Outage -- STATEWIDE

Outage Start: Monday, September 9th 2024

Expected Recovery: Unknown

 

What is Cognos?

Cognos is the reporting tool used by eSchool, eFinance and other state databases.  It is used for necessary state reporting but also for the collection and sharing of data with 3rd party software.

 

Summary

Cognos is considered a mission critical service by the state Department of Information Services.  As such outages are rare and usually measured in minutes.  It is extremely uncommon to measure a Cognos outage in hours. 

 

On the evening of September 9th I was notified by APSCN LAN Support that Cognos was down.  We were informed that DIS and ADE were working with IBM for a resolution.  No further details were given.

 

Impact

In addition to our not being able to run reports in Cognos that may be necessary for common reports we are also unable to update various software platforms.  Any platform that students “automatically” appear in after being registered is subject to this outage. 

Platforms include but are not limited to:

Clever (and everything that uses Clever, including but not limited to)

Acadience

Benchmark

Istation

McGraw Hill

Study Sync

Lightspeed

Apptegy Alerts

Badgepass

Ellevation

Renaissance

Titan FMS

 

On any platform that is affected at this time the recommendation is to try and just “weather the storm”.  We understand how much of an issue this is for everyone but any attempt at manually adding students to the platform could cause significant issues when Cognos is restored.  Before manually adding any students contact should be made with the platforms support team to confirm the best course of action.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The NSD Tech Dept and DIS fully understand the gravity of this situation.  I am confident that DIS is investing all resources possible to getting a solution in place as quickly as possible.  And I am confident that more information will be provided when available.  Unfortunately there is nothing that local districts can do to resolve these issues. 

 

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

 

Please feel free to share this with anyone that you think may need to know this information.

 

Thank you,

 

 

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Bryce Petty

Technology Coordinator

Nashville School District

600 N 4th Street

Nashville, AR 71852

870-845-3425

Fax: 870-845-7344