Monitoring Cube Performance and Usage - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 315

Monitoring Cube
Performance and Usage
We need to be able to monitor activity on Analysis Services if we're going to be
able to detect possible performance issues, to provide good service levels and to
optimize individual queries or processing operations. In order to learn how to do
this, first of all we need to know how Analysis Services interacts with the operating
system. Resources consumed by Analysis Services are controlled by the operating
system and we need to understand these relationships. After an introduction to the
tools and performance counters provided by the operating system, we will look at
Analysis Services Memory Manager and how it can be configured. In the last part of
this chapter, we will examine how to monitor specific operations in Analysis Services
such as processing and querying.
Analysis Services and the operating
system
The first concept we have to understand when learning about monitoring is that
Analysis Services is a process running as a service on a Microsoft Windows operating
system. Running as a service, it usually starts when the operating system starts and
is running even when no users are connected. The process name is msmdsrv.exe and
knowing this name is very important because it allows us to recognize the Analysis
Services process in lists of all processes running on a server, for example, when
we're using the Task Manager as in the following screenshot. You might have more
Analysis Services processes running at the same time—later in this chapter we will
see how to recognize which instance is linked to which process.