What’s New in Cognos 12.1.0 – The Story So Far…

IBM has just rolled out Cognos Analytics 12.1, and it’s packed with fresh features designed to make your analytics experience even smarter and more intuitive. In this blog, we’ll take you through the highlights of what’s new, from standout capabilities like Data Brushing to a roundup of enhancements introduced since the launch of Cognos 12. Whether you’re here to uncover new ways to explore your data or just want to stay on top of the latest updates, there’s plenty to dive into in this release.

Let’s start with one of the most eye-catching additions: Data Brushing. This new feature brings a whole new level of interactivity to your reports, making it easier than ever to spot patterns, relationships, and insights with just a few clicks.

Here is what it can do: 

• Allows users to quickly identify and explore relationships between data points across multiple visualisations. 
• Provides a more user friendly and intuitive way to understand data patterns and trends. 
• Enables the consumer to easily compare data points across the page. 
• Allows users to interact with the data and discover new perspectives.  

It’s a simple but impactful concept that greatly assists consumers with their ability to understand their data, improves the consumption of information on complex reports and helps consumers understand relationships between data points. 

The AI components continue to receive usability and natural language improvements, especially with the assistant’s ability to respond and guide. Visualisations continue to be enhanced, with a huge number of improvements: additional tooltips, extra detail when exporting to PDF, conditional formatting, dual line charts, zero axis gridlines, the ability to remove icons on visualisations, stacked value totals, resizing column widths and heights, styling options in table visualisations, hide category summaries, and percentages/ overall values shown in legends. 

“There’s way more and this isn’t a small update, so grab a coffee and keep reading to understand all the improvements version 12 brings!” 

Cognos Analytics 12.1.0  

Consuming Reports 

Cognos Analytics 12.1.0 introduces Data Brushing – the ability to select and highlight data points across multiple containers in interactive reports. This powerful new feature enables users to interact with data by highlighting related data points across visualisations and other objects within the same report page. When a user selects a data point in one object, corresponding data points in other objects are highlighted. 

Depending on what the user selects, one of three levels of highlighting is applied. Primary highlights the original data selection and any other exact matches using the primary colour. Secondary highlights context on edges, helping to provide a clear view of relationships. The third, known as Tertiary, highlights related measures, which offers additional context. 

In this initial release, brushing supports highlighting across the objects, not filtering, although future releases will expand functionality to include filtering capabilities. The consumer has the ability to enable and disable “Interactive brushing” on the viewer toolbar themselves. Just remember that the default is set to off. Brushing interactions are controlled by Cognos Analytics using predefined rules within the product and can’t be amended yet. However, this will be improved on in future releases, with the report author given control over the interactions and objects in scope for brushing.  

This IBM video provides an overview of this new feature. This is the first iteration of the brushing feature, which enables interactivity in HTML reports. 

Dashboards 

There are some minor changes to dashboards, including a new Row Limit property that helps limit data in visualisations, which can significantly enhance dashboard performance. 

Look and Feel 

Some big changes here are to the Welcome page! You’ll now see 3 main tiles: Create, Assistant, Learn. These give instant access to some of the main self-service features of Cognos Analytics which allow the user to begin creating content with the minimum of fuss. 

You’ll also find new Content view tabs, showing Team Content, My Content and Favourites on the welcome page. A little bonus: any sorting or filtering you set up will be remembered for next time. 

 There have also been changes to the New option for creating content. Previously it was a fly-out menu, this has now been changed to a standard menu. 

Cognos 12.0.4 “New menu	Cognos 12.1.0 “New” menu

Reporting  

The Andale WT font has been removed with version 12.1.0. Any use of Andale WT will now be replaced with IBM Plex Sans.  

In previous versions of Cognos Analytics, any changes to CSV output options had to be specified globally – and would affect all reports across all users. Now, specific CSV options can be set when authoring or running reports and report views.  

Report authors also now have the ability to specify default search options for the Search & Select prompt. 

Modeling 

Webview2 is now enabled by default for Framework Manager and Cube Designer. Webview2 improves compatibility with newer web browsers and web standards, particularly for authentication purposes. This will also give some pages in Framework Manager a more modern look and feel – such as the Publish Wizard, Find Report Dependencies, Groups Wizard and Datasource Wizard. 

For those using Cognos Analytics on Cloud Hosted, you now have the ability to install and use client tools (Framework Manager, SDK, Transformer). Users must be given the Desktop Tools capability to download and use these client tools. 

Some deprecated features in Framework Manager – version 12.1.0 no longer supports Model Design Accelerator, XML data sources in DQM models, and SQL-XML functions in Cognos SQL. 

Administration 

Cognos Analytics 12.1.0 introduces 2 major changes to SMTP server configuration. Mail server configuration has been moved from Cognos Configuration to the Manage page. There is also support for Oauth authentication for SMTP servers – but currently ONLY for Microsoft mail servers, since Microsoft no longer support basic authentication. 

And behind the scenes 

Cognos Analytics 12.1.0 now runs on a new Java platform, IBM Semeru version 17. You won’t notice any changes from the front-end, but this update, lays the foundation for expanded capabilities in Cognos Analytics for future releases. There are also updates to the underlying technology supporting the Learn panel, leaving the door open to future enhancements. 

Cognos 12 Revisited 

Now that we’ve looked at what’s new in Cognos 12.1.0, let’s look back at everything that changed since the initial release of Cognos 12 way back in June 2023. 

In our initial look at Cognos 12 in the blog from August 2024, our impression was that it was more of a “statement of intent” release, with a big move towards AI, bringing the Assistant front and centre of the product.  

But what’s changed since then? 

Well, we are now on release 12.1.0, released in April 2025, and the previous version (12.0.4) has been marked by IBM as the Long Term Support Release (LTSR). This gives assurance that 12.0.4 will be supported for at least a couple of years without the need to upgrade. We’ll summarise the changes between the initial release of Cognos 12 and version 12.0.4. 

Look and feel 

We’ve seen in version 12.1.0 that IBM has changed the look and feel, but in earlier versions of Cognos 12 there were other look and feel changes. More product features have adopted the IBM Carbon Design System – aligning IBM products with the same look and feel across platforms. Previously, they still used the old “Cognos Connection” look and feel from Cognos 10. In particular, Run History Details, Drill-through Definitions, Running Agents, and Archive Versions features all use the IBM Carbon system (12.0.3). 

12.0.4 introduced enhanced Upload and Create drop zones on the welcome page, although these have now been revamped again in the latest 12.1.0 release. 

Favourites 

Introduced in version 12.0.1, you can now mark reports and dashboards as favourites. These will then appear in your Favourites tab. (12.0.1) 

You can mark items as favourites by clicking the heart icon (🤍) – this will then change to a filled heart (🖤). Alternatively choose “add to favourites” from the context menu. 

Content can also be sorted by Favourites. 

Search result enhancements 

Version 12.0.1 introduced Results reasons – when using search, an explanation will be offered as to why the content has been included in the search results when you select Result reason from the right click context menu. (12.0.1) 

File upload enhancements 

Files can now be uploaded by dragging and dropping onto the Upload Data and create tile on the welcome page (12.0.1) 

 AI Improvements 

AI components continue to receive usability and natural language improvements with every version release. In particular, there have been significant enhancements to the questions “what is, when is, where is, who is” and assistant can now respond appropriately (12.0.1). 

Using information about your current needs and behaviour whilst using Cognos, recommendations in the Learn pane are now personally tailored to you. Search suggestions and auto-complete are also included in the Learn pane (12.0.1). 

The assistant has been improved, and if you ask a general usage question it will now redirect you to the Learn pane, where you can find product documentation, blogs and videos (introduced in 12.0.1). 

Previous to 12.0.1, when sharing from the Assistant, you could only share visualisations. Now, you can share insights via email, Teams or Slack – with or without the associated visualisation. You can also drag visualisations from Assistant to an already open dashboard (12.0.1) 

Assistant now shows improved key driver and influencer responses. (12.0.3)  

Dashboards 

You can now hide or show summaries in tables and crosstabs (12.0.4) 

12.0.4 also introduces the ability to style individual headers and wrap text in table headers. 

When uploading files, month weekday and season columns are now recognised as such and will be sorted accordingly. (12.0.1) 

In the example below, a simple excel workbook has columns for Year, Month, Customer and Order Qty. The excel file is not sorted in any order, but when we import the file and create a dashboard or data module, Cognos has recognised the months and sorted them: 

It is now possible to include additional data items in the on-screen tooltips. Simply drag the data item into the # Tooltip section and it will now appear when you hover over the relevant visualisation on your dashboard. (12.0.1) 

Expanding visualisation content in PDF output – previously, when exporting a visualisation or dashboard to PDF, the export was a mirror of what was on-screen. However, it is now possible to export detailed information by choosing the New Page option on the PDF properties. (12.0.1) 

 Widget connection limit increased from 5 to 20 – you can now create up to 20 groups of widgets. (12.0.2) 

• Visualisations can now be embedded into external websites. Using the Embed function from the dashboard toolbar, a code snippet can be copied and used in an external HTML document / site. Users viewing the visualisation from the external site must have a license to use Cognos Analytics. (12.0.2). 
• Generate automatic dashboards from uploaded or existing data sources. (12.0.3) 
• Drill through enhancements – viewing and setting drill through parameters has been enhanced to aid usability. (12.0.3) 
• Custom labels for data columns in a dashboard (12.0.3) 
• A customisable Value Ttext property is now available on various prompts to allow report authors to show a value in the header of the prompt for those prompts that don’t have a Header Text option. As an example this would apply to Date/Time and Text Box prompts. (12.0.4)  

There is now a search option in the properties pane in Reporting (12.0.4) 

Search and select prompts can now be resized in interactive reports (12.0.4). 

When showing HTML links or drill- throughs in HTML format reports, previously it was not possible to override the base colour for the hyperlink. It is now possible to override the selection colour in the report properties (12.0.4). 

Visualisations 

Additional visualisations have been given the conditional formatting feature (12.0.2): 

• Area 
• Bar 
• Bubble 
• Bullet 
• Column 
• Line 
• Pie 
• Point 
• Stacked bar 
• Stacked column 
• Treemap 

 A new “Dual Line Visualisation” has been added that shows relationships between data sets. This is similar to a Cognos 10 Combination Chart, but with 2 lines instead of a mix of line and column, for example  (12.0.2) 

 Value axis zero grid line in visualisations – you can now place a custom line at the zero point of the value axis (12.0.2) 

Hide or show icons in the visualisation header – you can hide or show various icons in the visualisation header, including the Filters, Forecast, Insights and Narrative Insights icons (12.0.1) 

Styling titles for repeated columns and rows – you can now style titles of repeated visualisations (12.0.1). 

Stack labels in stacked visualisations – you can use the Show stack label property to show the sum of each item’s contributions to the length of a stacked bar or stacked column. (12.0.1) 

Additional fields in line and column visualisation – you can now provide a value for Column y-start and column target to draw additional data points on the visualisation. IBM’s example is that of a visualisation showing Worldwide gross revenue as Column length and Foreign gross revenue as Line position for Movie genres. Box office average is Column target and Opening Weekend revenue is Column y-start. (12.0.1). 

Table and crosstab visualisation column widths and heights can now be resized. Simply click the column border on the right and you can drag the border to the left or right. (12.0.3) 

It is also now possible to hide summaries for categorical data columns in table and crosstab visualisations by selecting hide summary in the right click context menu (12.0.4) 

 It is now possible to style the text of individual column and row headers in a crosstab visualisation, using the Style Text option on the right-click context menu. If “apply to all columns and headings” is deselected, column and row headings can be styled individually. 12.0.3). You can also now wrap text in column headings (12.0.4) 

You can now display values in a visualisation legend. The value in legend property allows you to choose whether to show a value, a percentage, or both value and percentage (12.0.3) 

In this example, the legend shows the number of calls by site, and the percentage of the overall total for each site. 

It is also now possible to limit the number of items in a legend in supported visualisations using the “maximum items in legend” property. (12.0.3) 

A Tornado visualisation is now available for dashboards and reports, allowing comparisons of two categories of a data series (12.0.4). 

 Reports 

• A new RSVP advanced property has been added to allow consistent naming of Excel sheets –  RSVP.EXCEL.XLS2007_SUFFIX_PAGENUMBER with a default a value of true. There has also been changes to the default values of RSVP.EXCEL.NUMBEREDSHEETNAMES which now defaults to false. 
• Map manager has been removed and is no longer available to use. (12.0.2) 
• Search and Select prompts now refresh without needing to reload the entire page  (12.0.2) 
• RSVP recordings allow reporting activity to be recorded for troubleshooting purposes. Previously it was a global server setting that required a full service restart. Now it is a per-user setting that can be enabled without a server restart. (12.0.2) 
• Simply add the advanced setting Reporting.RecordUser (12.0.2) 
• Custom controls can now be added directly to the Insertable objects toolbox (12.0.3) 

 Modeling 

• Multilingual Metadata – Labels, descriptions, screentips, table names and column names in data modules can now be translated based on a user’s locale, or to provide multiple versions of a string in the same language. (12.0.1) 
• Custom Sorting – data items can be sorted not only in ascending or descending order, but in a custom order. Some default custom sort options are provided, for season, months and weekdays – these are automatically identified and applied but can be overridden if required (12.0.1) 
• Auto relationships – a data module can now auto-detect relationships from multiple sources, to minimize the work required from the modeller. (12.0.2) 

You can now create a dashboard directly from within a data module interface, by using the Create dashboard link (12.0.2). Version 12.0.4 also added the ability to create a report directly, by using the Create report link (12.0.4). 

In previous versions of Cognos 12, to make some amendments to custom tables, it was necessary to delete and recreate the custom table. It is now possible to edit existing union, except and intersect custom tables. (12.0.2). 

It is now possible to perform enrichment of metadata on OLAP sources. Enrichment is the process where Cognos evaluates the content of a data source to determine its usage – for example, dates and locations. It was previously only possible to perform this enrichment on relational sources. (12.0.3) 

In data modules that are based on other data modules, some relationships between shortcut tables are shown as dotted lines in the Relationships diagram. The dotted line can be considered a shortcut to a relationship in the source data module. 

Event Agent 

In response to user demand, Event studio returns as a standard component – now called Event Agent (12.0.1) 

Mobile 

Cognos Analytics Mobile now supports Microsoft InTune to control end user access and protect data. (12.0.2). 

Administration 

• New schedule governance options have been introduced to allow administrators to control a wider range of scheduling criteria, such as minimum time between schedule runs. (12.0.4). 
• Administrators now have the ability to list capabilities by user, for any user. This is accesseds from the Mange > Licenses pane, selecting Details, then selecting Action > Capabilities. (12.0.4)  
• Printer configuration is now accessible from the Manage pane, rather than Cognos Administration, with a modernised user experience (12.0.4) 
• Activities page enhancements – “higher quality” visualisations, cleaner data tables, various chart customisation and filtering options, and interactivity with chart elements. (12.0.1). 

File size limits – it is now possible to set limits on data set and file upload sizes. Manage this via manage > configuration > system > data. The following properties can be modified (12.0.1): 

•  Size limit per data set (MB) 
• Maximum rows allowed for an uploaded file 
• Maximum columns allowed for an uploaded file 
• Maximum rows allowed for a data set 
• Maximum columns allowed for a data set 

Additionally, 12.0.4 introduced a setting to limit the maximum size of an uploaded extension (12.0.4). 

A new advanced setting has been introduced to limit the number of concurrent report server connections per user. This is called event.max.concurrent.executions.per.user and is specified against the batchReportService (12.0.4). 

Stored data Management – users can now manage a list of data sets and uploaded files that they own (Personal menu > Profile and Settings > My Stored Data). Administrators can manage stored data for the entire environment (Manage > People > Stored Data). (12.0.2). 

Data from uploaded files and data sets can now be stored in a supported DB2 instance. This functionality is currently DB2 only. (12.0.2) 

Dynamic namespaces – Administrators can now create and maintain a namespace via the Manage component. This type of namespace is called a dynamic namespace. Namespaces created via Cognos Configuration are called classic namespaces.  

• The term dynamic is used because the namespace is managed within the Cognos Analytics product, and the Cognos Analytics service does not need to be restarted. (12.0.2) 
• A new secured function, Manage Namespaces, is available under the Administration capability. This is to support the new Dynamic namespaces functionality. (12.0.2).  
• Support for Planning Analytics as a Service – this allows MDX to be sent directly to the PA server, allowing Cognos to offload MDX processing rather than processing in the query service, reducing query service load. (12.0.3) 
• Support for Microsoft Analysis Services 2022 (ODBO and XMLA) (12.0.3) 
• Salesforce API updated to version 59.0 by default (12.0.3) 

More administrative functions moved from legacy administrative interface to the Manage component (12.0.3): 

• Run history details 
• Drill through definitions 
• Running agents and agent Views 
• Archive versions 
• Specify multiple languages 

And finally: 

• Exposing user, object and system settings in JSON (12.0.3) 
• New Watson.x.data connection editor (12.0.2) 
• Enhanced support for Content Security Policies (12.0.2) 

Deprecated features (as of 12.0.3) 

Map Manager maps are no longer supported 

Data source connections – removed support: 

• PostgreSQL 10.x and 11.x 
• Denodo 7.x 
• Vertica 10.x 
• Exasol 7.x 
• MySQL 5.6 
• Mongo BI 2.13 or earlier 
• MariaDB 10.2 
• SingleStore 7.1 and 7.3 
• Dremio 17 
• Db2 LUW 10.1 

Data source connections – connections blocked: 

• Denodo 6.x 
• Vertica 9.x 

OS support removed: 

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Server 7 
• Ubuntu 16 
• Ubuntu 18 
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 

In conclusion 

Cognos Analytics 12.1.0 builds on a steady stream of enhancements introduced since version 12 first launched in June 2023. From the introduction of data brushing and expanded AI capabilities, to ongoing improvements in dashboards, reporting, and administration, each release reflects IBM’s commitment to evolving the platform. Whether you’re an end user, modeller, or administrator, there’s something in these updates that improves usability, performance, or control. And with more functionalities being embedded directly into the web experience, Cognos 12 continues to modernise in all the right places. 

About the author

John Wilkinson – Solution Architect 

John is a highly skilled Senior Solution Architect with over 20 years of experience. He is widely recognised as a top consultant in the industry, having worked with IBM Cognos solutions since 2001. His Microsoft competency spans SQL, Power BI and Cloud Data Engineering.