IBM Cognos licensing and audit defense.

Cognos Analytics is licensed against named user roles and, for some deployments, against processor capacity. Authorized User entitlements are assigned to specific individuals by role, with administrators, authors, and consumers carrying different entitlement weights. A user who only views dashboards is not the same line item as one who builds and schedules reports, and counting them as equals in either direction creates exposure.

Where Cognos is licensed by processor, the PVU metric applies: PVU per core times the cores allocated to the software, with sub-capacity available only when ILMT is deployed and reporting correctly. On Cloud Pak for Data, Cognos is consumed through entitlement on the platform metric rather than as a standalone install, which changes how the count is read entirely.

Cognos also ships with a restricted use Db2 for its content store and reporting repository. That entitlement is limited to supporting the Cognos deployment. Using it as a general purpose database is one of the most common bundling findings IBM raises.