Karan Gulati (SSAS Maestro)

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:

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.