Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence

Chapter 17Managing and Maintaining the Business Intelligence Environment

One of the key success factors of a business intelligence project is the end-user experience. This experience—unfortunately for those individuals involved in the project—is solely based on how the solution performs: simply put, how fast the solution provides answers, renders reports, delivers data, and so on. If any aspect of this is not optimal, the outcome could be detrimental to the entire project. For example, if the CEO opens a dashboard and it takes more than a couple of seconds, how likely will he or she revisit that dashboard? Although this is an overly simplistic example, in actuality something that simple can easily mar the perception of months or even years of work. As a result, any solution should include a performance monitoring strategy that keeps a proactive eye on all aspects of the deployment.

Remember that this book's topics focus on the aspects of business intelligence that assume an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process and data warehouse are already implemented. Therefore, this chapter does not focus on monitoring performance as it relates to those topics, but instead on tools and features that have already been discussed.

Using SQL Server Reporting Services

The methods, techniques, and tools used to monitor Reporting Services in native or SharePoint integrated mode are mostly the same. However, SharePoint does include diagnostic logging events that can be used in addition to ...