In this chapter, we saw a set of tools and techniques that we can use to monitor an Analysis Services instance. We already mentioned that it is a good idea to save trace and performance counter information in logfiles or SQL Server tables, so we can perform more detailed analysis on them. The logical next step would be to build a complete monitoring solution that could provide reports, statistics, and detailed information on all aspects of performance and usage, and that would be always running in the background, collecting data.

We could use all of this data as a source for a "performance and usage data mart", and use our favorite tools such as Reporting Services and Analysis Services to build a BI solution for ourselves. If we have specific requirements or we have to integrate the monitoring solution with an existing system, designing a custom solution could be a good idea, for example, we might simply build Reporting Services reports that access...