Today I was reading Chris Webb post ”Visualising Analysis Services Trace Information in Reporting Services” where at the end he talks about tools to monitor SSAS, that made me thinking about SSAS 2008 DMVs again. So I went back to my SSAS 2008 installation to see what do we have new in CTP6. Just after release Darren Gosbell already blogged about new DMVs in his post “SSAS 2008: What’s new in the Schema Rowsets?“. But just after I started to run queries I realized how cool these new DMVs are. After quick test on them, I decided to blog today about my favorite DMV so far: $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_OBJECT_ACTIVITY.
The best thing about this new $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_OBJECT_ACTIVITY DMV is the fact that it provides resource usage per object since the start of the service. When querying $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_SESSIONS DMV, as soon as user disconnects, all information is lost. But this new DMV has aggregated statistic for all users since Analysis services start. So now quick queries can give you idea where Analysis Services works hardest.