Admin Agent: Automated Credential Health & Rotation

Overview:     The Cognos Administration Agent should provide a fully automated and proactive Credential Health & Rotation capability to prevent schedule failures caused by expired, deprovisioned, or misconfigured credentials. This feature strengthens reliability, reduces manual administrative effort, and supports audit and compliance requirements.

Possible technical implementation / features:  

1. Credential Health Monitoring

The Administration Agent continuously scans all schedules for credential risks, including:

• Expired or expiring personal credentials
• Password policy violations
• Deactivated or offboarded user accounts
• Service account credentials nearing expiration

The Agent presents these findings in a Credential Health Dashboard, allowing administrators to filter by credential type (Person vs Machine), owner, namespace, folder, expiry window, and status. An export option (CSV) supports reporting and follow-up.

2. Intelligent Credential Replacement Suggestions

When at‑risk schedules are detected, the Agent provides automated replacement suggestions, such as:

• Machine users marked for distribution
• Group‑level service accounts for the target data source
• Team or department service accounts used by similar schedules

For each candidate credential, the Agent highlights e.g. Credential type (Machine / Person), Last known successful usage, etc.. This accelerates and standardizes the rotation process.

3. Bulk or Single Credential Rotation with Approval Workflow

Administrators can approve and apply suggested replacements directly within the Agent. E.g. 

• Rotation in single or bulk mode
• Overriding suggested replacements per schedule
• Mandatory approval comments for audit purposes
• Execution queue with progress status and detailed results per schedule

Failures are clearly flagged with actionable error messages.

4. Audit Reporting & Traceability

After execution, the Agent provides a Credential Rotation Report capturing e.g. 

• Schedule name, path, ID, and owner
• Old → New credential mapping (masked)
• Executor, timestamp, and approval comment
• Rotation status and any error details

Reports are exportable (CSV/PDF), and every credential change results in a granular audit log entry.

5. Rollback Capability

For a configurable window (e.g., 14 days), administrators can revert credential changes with a Rollback action that restores the previous credential mapping.
Optional validation checks confirm connectivity after rollback.
All rollback actions are logged with the same audit rigor as rotations.

6. Post-Rotation Validation

The Agent automatically validates schedule health after credential updates, ensuring e.g. 

• Data source connectivity with the new credential
• Successful simulation of the next scheduled run
• Folder and permission validation

Any issues are flagged for remediation before the next real execution.

Cognos Administration Agent as a proactive reliability and compliance engine, reducing operational risk and eliminating time-consuming manual credential maintenance. It ensures that Cognos schedules continue to run reliably even during employee turnover, password policy changes, or service account updates.