In this chapter, we spent most of our time describing the key resources that we have to monitor for Analysis Services: Memory, CPU, and I/O. These resources are controlled by the operating system, and for this reason, we looked at how Analysis Services interacts with the operating system and with other processes that may also be competing for resources. We discovered what the most important operating system performance counters are for monitoring an Analysis Services installation, and what tools we have available for accessing them.

After that, we explored various techniques for monitoring processing, query activity, and usage of Analysis Services. We focused on using tools such as SQL Server Profiler, ASTrace, Activity Viewer, and MDX Studio; we also looked at the detailed information provided by traces, performance counters, and Dynamic Management Views for each of the monitoring scenarios.

Finally, we discussed building a complete monitoring solution and pointed out that such a...