There is a wide variety of metrics available in IBM Cognos 8 installation to help monitor the system performance.
The cognos system metrics include the following groups:

Session metrics - containing such metrics as number of sessions

Queue metrics - Latency, Number of queue requests, Queue length, Time in queue

JVM metrics - monitor Java heap size (memory currently used) and up time

Request metrics - monitor volume of requests, operational status of services, response and processing times

Process Metrics for Report and Batch Report Service - Number of processes

Most of the metrics include the following set of values:
- current value (a point in time)
- high watermark value (a maximum value since the last reset)
- low watermark value (a minimum value since the last reset)