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SSAS Crashing Intermittently: Caused by Monitoring / AV Scans

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Problem Description:

Analysis Services is crashing intermittently and also producing min-dumps.

Assessment:

This could be one of the issues. For getting full analysis of Mini-Dump you can involve Microsoft Customer Support Services and ask them to analyze dumps.

In this case we found:

The issue is SMS client (CcmExec) does software inventory periodically, and it scans the data folder of Analysis Services. When a job needs to commit, it has to delete older version of data files. At the moment, the SMS client has a file handle on some of the database files, causing SSAS unable to delete the older version of the database, so commit fails and crashes SSAS

As you can see in this Process Monitor – CcmExec is browsing through SQL Folders:

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Resolution

We have resolved issue by making an exception in SMS client not to browse / scan SSAS Folders
- Data
- Temp
- Config
- Log

Recommendations

Exclude Analysis Services folders from Virus Scans, File Monitoring Tools, Systems Management Server Client – CcmExec.exe or any other 3p File Monitoring or File Backup Tool.

For SQL engine follow recommendations are given in this link - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/309422