Monitor SSAS performance counters using a cube!

This is a tool I would have mentioned in the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book I wrote last year. Unfortunately, the ResMon sample cube has been published just a few days before PASS Summit 2010 on CodePlex. It simply uses SSAS DMVs as a data source and makes a lot of information easily readable and browsable by using a PivotTable!

You can take a look at the documentation to see a few screenshots of possible usages. To me, also the simple static view can be really useful to understand which database is consuming SSAS memory. For example: if you have a development machine with SSAS installed and so many SSAS databases there… that nobody uses anymore… well, you should be aware that SSAS reads some metadata anyway, even if you never queried that database. We are talking about tens of megabytes per database here, and the size depends on metadata complexity. Yes, maybe you will clean up your SSAS development machine after you will realize how much memory your 2-years old projects still consumes just to start the Analysis Services process.

Kudos to Edward Melomed, who originally created this nice and elegant implementation, and to Greg Galloway that further refined and published it!