SSAS Monitoring Tool– ASTrace
Guys, We have noticed customers asking a tool for Monitoring SSAS Activities; So we have added new features to an existing ASTrace of SQL 2005 and introduced a new version for SQL 2008/R2 & SQL 2012(MOLAP and Tabular).
With this tool you can monitor minimum to maximum SSAS Information. Architecture is pretty simple, ASTrace runs as a service on any server which got prerequisite installed (as stated in documentation) -> collect trace information based on trace template for an SSAS Instance stated in configuration file (you can customize and use your own trace template) and finally pushes trace data into a SQL Table enabling you to query this SQL Table and pull required information.
You can customize Trace Template, SQL Table and Database Name. Documentation will provide you an idea of enhancements which we had done in new version of ASTrace.
AS Trace2008 (SQL 2008 / R2)
AS Trace2012 (MOLAP / Tabular)
Caveat- By design
Restarting ASTrace Service –
By design, ASTrace will stop auditing whenever you restart the Analysis Service instance. Therefore, any time that you restart Analysis Services you will also need to restart the ASTrace service.
When the ASTrace service restarts, the service automatically writes the content of the existing table, ASTrace, to a new table with a timestamp. For example:
| Old traces | ASTraceTable_Archive_Tuesday, January 31, 201212:56:35 AM |
| New and current traces | ASTrace |
This workaround is required because trace files are always truncated by the function, InitializeAsWriter. Unless you take action to save the existing trace information, when the service restarts, all previous trace information would be lost. To preserve the trace information prior to the service restart, the ASTrace utility programmatically creates a table, adds a timestamp, and writes any existing trace to the time-stamped table. This lets you maintain a history of events prior to the service restart.
This trigger enables you in collating the result of all ASTrace table and you can run a SQL query for pulling information against single table.
Feel free to ping me if you need any assistance.
Disclaimer
These is a sample tool and will not be supported by CSS.
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Just wondering if this still has an issue on 64bit machine. I am getting this error:
14/11/2013 5:38:52 PM: Service Started in ‘C:\ASTrace2008’
14/11/2013 5:38:52 PM: Created trace for Analysis Server : ‘LocalHost’
14/11/2013 5:38:55 PM: Cannot start Analysis Server trace:
14/11/2013 5:38:55 PM: Analysis Server name: ‘LocalHost\MSSQLServer’
14/11/2013 5:38:55 PM: Trace definition : ‘C:\ASTrace2008\Standard.tdf’
14/11/2013 5:38:55 PM: Error: Failed to initialize object as reader.
I am trying to install this on my desktop machine… on Local SQL Server. Then later I am planning to change the connection to the production server.
I also tried to install on the production server if it works.. I am getting the same error.
Can you help me with this please??
Thanks!!!
P.S I found an article saying it has an issue on 64 bit as it was written for 32 bit. so I tried to look for the source code but I couldn’t find on the net.
can you pls. point me to article….