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.

However, let's first concentrate on the following screenshot:

As Analysis Services is a Windows process, the first thing we can analyze is the interaction between that process and the hosting operating system. It's the operating system that...