12.6. Usage Monitoring
A secure DW/BI system will have usage monitoring in place. In an increasingly regulated world, it's extremely valuable to know who is connected to the system and what they're doing.
In Chapter 15 we talk about how to set up usage monitoring on Analysis Services, Reporting Services, and the relational engine. For some organizations it's sufficient simply to collect logons: who's accessing the database and when? Other organizations need to know exactly who is accessing which information.
Reporting Services monitors usage by default. In addition, Reporting Services provides an option to copy the usage logs from the Reporting Services catalog into a separate database. This option provides a target relational database, Integration Services packages to move the data, and a starter set of reports. This database should suffice for the majority of usage reporting requirements from Reporting Services.
Usage monitoring provides other valuable benefits. It's a valuable tool for performance tuning. Spending a bit of time analyzing how business users are accessing data is very valuable for understanding how to improve your DW/BI system.
If you set up a usage monitoring system—as we strongly recommend—you should inform your business users of what you're doing, why, and how the information will be used.
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