Monitoring Azure Analysis Services with Log Analytics and Power BI

How do you monitor Azure Analysis Services? How many users are connected and who are they? These are great questions to understand around your AAS environment. While metric data is exposed via the Metrics blade for Azure Analysis Services in the portal, it's a quick means to answer these questions. What if you wanted to combine this information with other operational data within your organization? Especially around the area of QPU (or query processing units, which is how AAS is priced). While extended events work in Azure Analysis Services, parsing the resulting XML files into human readable form is cumbersome, difficult, and time consuming. Just as many aspects of the cloud should require some thought process into how systems are designed, it's prudent to rethink the monitoring aspect as well. By using Microsoft Log Analytics, it's possible to build a complete monitoring solution for Azure Analysis Services with a simple Power BI Dashboard that can be accessed along with the rest of needed operational information for system administrators. Log Analytics provides near real-time data exploration for telemetry. There is a great reference here from Brian Harry. The remainder of this post serves to detail setting up this process. One of the elegant approaches of this solution is that once it is set up, apart from the refresh of the power bi report no maintenance is required between the azure analysis services and monitoring step (as opposed to extended events). Without further delay, let's look at the steps required.

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