Monitoring usage
Apart from monitoring the performance of processing and queries, another important activity is monitoring the overall usage of Analysis Services. At any given point in time, we might want to know who is connected to Analysis Services and who is running queries, for example, because we might want to warn users that we're about to restart the service for maintenance reasons. Also, in the long term, it is interesting to know which cubes and hierarchies are used and which are not, what type of queries are being run, who the most active users are, which users never use the system, and so on.
To monitor usage, we can use the same tools that we've used in the previous sections.
Monitoring usage with trace data
Collecting trace data in a SQL Server table can be a very useful way to determine the most active users, or the most frequent or expensive queries, over a long period of time. The most important event to capture is Query End/MDX Query. The Duration column for this event can...
