How can you monitor your BI tool performance like a pro?

Speaking about the Microsoft business intelligence tools. We can use DAX studio to help us in monitoring the data model and to make it more efficient in terms of performance. Dax did you helps us to to know the measures and tables and columns sizes and memory consumption which will help us so much in provisioning the whole project and to know if it takes so much time in running or refreshing.

A baseline is the average or normal performance level of your BI tool under normal conditions. A benchmark is the target or desired performance level of your BI tool based on industry standards or best practices. You can use historical data, user feedback, or external sources to determine your baseline and benchmarks. By comparing your current performance with your baseline and benchmarks, you can identify any gaps or anomalies and take corrective actions.

Using IT supervision tools like Zabbix, Centreon, Nagios, and so on, can give a good overview of the consumed resources on servers. As BI systems can generate huge amounts of logs and process large sets of data, implementing a proper supervision and mail alert system will prevent your system from going down because of resource shortages. It will also keep track more easily of what can impact performance and availability through dashboards and KPIs.

The best way to have a reliable BI monitoring and be able to measure the performance and act quickly is to have automatic alerts set up, using proper tools. Having dashboards for the BI monitoring is so useful. It makes the outliers or failed jobs easier to find as it’s catchy for the eyes. You can apply traffic lights symbols for that. Also having a tool, helps you finding the bottlenecks, see the overall picture, to do a better root-cause analysis and avoid the same failure from happening again. For example, if too many jobs are running at the same time and they consume too much memory, or even try to reach same source.

Monitoring tools can help you track and troubleshoot various aspects of your BI tool performance, such as server load, CPU usage, memory consumption, network traffic, query execution, data ingestion, and data transformation. Dashboards can help you visualize and communicate your performance data in an intuitive and interactive way, using charts, graphs, tables, and alerts

Monitoring your BI tool performance is not enough; you also need to implement best practices and optimization techniques to improve and maintain your BI tool performance. Design your data model and queries with performance in mind, choosing the appropriate data storage type and format for your data. Additionally, scaling your BI tool resources and architecture, as well as testing and updating it regularly, can help you distribute your workload and fix any bugs or compatibility issues. Furthermore, compressing, archiving, or deleting any unnecessary or redundant data can save space and improve data freshness.

It’s good to track usage metrics for many purposes. Which report was accessed, how often, by whom etc. Then it helps with prioritization, which reports should be reviewed and updated first, which might be removed. Of course ask for the feedback from the users, conduct initial and follow-up trainings for them, organize support, make sure that there is a good maintenance of the BI tools.