Monitoring Analysis Services Performance

System Monitor is a graphical tool in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 for measuring the performance of your own computer or other computers on a network. (In Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0, this tool is called Performance Monitor). You can use either System Monitor or Performance Monitor to do the tasks described in this section. For each computer, you can view the behavior of objects, such as processors, memory, cache, threads, and processes. Each of these objects has an associated set of counters that measure device usage, queue lengths, delays, and other indicators of throughput and internal congestion. The dynamic link library that provides the performance objects and counters for Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services, MSMDCTR80.DLL, is installed into the \Bin subdirectory of the Analysis Services directory.

Windows System Monitor provides charting, alerting, and reporting capabilities that reflect both current activity and ongoing logging. You can open, browse, and chart log files later as if they reflected current activity.

Installing and Uninstalling Analysis Services Performance Counters

To manually install the performance objects and counters supplied by Analysis Services, for use with the System Monitor, the following steps must be performed.

Installing Analysis Services Performance Counters

1. Add the named values in the following table to the following registry key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSSQLServerOLAPService\Performance 
   

   The registry path is described in the following table.

   Named value	Value
   Library	The file path of the Msmdctr80.dll library
   Open	OpenPerformanceData
   Collect	CollectPerformanceData
   Close	ClosePerformanceData

   
   
2. The information for the performance counters must be installed into the registry. Two files, Msmdctr.ini and Msmdctr.h, are included for this purpose. The two files are typically installed in the same location as the msmdctr80.dll library. To load this information into the registry, use the LODCTR.EXE program distributed with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. To install, execute the following command in a command prompt:

   LODCTR msmdctr.ini

Note   If the Performance Monitor extensible counter DLL path in the registry contains more than 62 characters, you will receive an "Access violation" error message in Performance Monitor (Perfmon.exe) when you click Add Counters in any chart, log, or report. For more information about resolving this issue, see Knowledge Base article Q242472, "Access Violation in Perfmon When Using Long Extensible Counter DLL Path in the Registry."

Uninstalling Analysis Services Performance Counters

1. To uninstall the performance objects and counters, use the UNLODCTR.EXE program distributed with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 for this purpose. To uninstall, execute the following command in a command prompt:

   UNLODCTR MSSQLServerOLAPService
   

Analysis Services provides objects and counters that can be used to monitor activity in computers running Analysis Services. The topics in the following table of objects provide more detailed information about monitoring Analysis Services performance.

See Also