Creating a Top Ten Report: Cognos Report Studio

When working with Tivoli Common Reporting v1.3 you may want to create a report that will only show the top number ‘n’ of the data. A common error is using topCount() which will return the top ten results but if two results contain the same value it will add both of them. For example a set of numbers such as (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,1) would actually show a graph of eleven items because of the repeated ‘1’. This is a step-by-step guide on how to create a report which will truly limit the results to a given number N.

1. Log into Tivoli Integrated Portal
2. Launch – > Report Studio or open the report you would like to use for the top results report
3. Mouse-over Query Explorer and click on the Query you would like to use
4. On the left-hand side, drag in the data item you are trying to rank
5. Using the Toolbox, create a new data item, name it something like ranked <data item>. The expression for this data item will be rank([Data Item] for report) ex: rank([ITM Siebel Agent (Consolidation)].[Siebel Component CPU                   Usage(Hourly)].[Average Percent Processor Time] for report)
6. Create another new data item and name it something like running count <data item>. The expression for this data item will be running-count([Ranked]) where Ranked is the data item we created in the last step. ex: running-count([Ranked Percent Processor Time])
7. The last step is to create a detailed filter. Drag a filter from the Toolbox into the ‘detailed filter’ and create a filter similar to this: [running-count] <= N ex: [Running Count Percent Processor Time] <= 10
8. Now when you run a report only the top N number of results will show.