Is SSAS service included in Power BI Report Server on premise

[Anonymous]

Is SSAS service included in Power BI Report Server on premise?

[bobjSrikanth]

Hi d_gosebell,

As you mentioned, There is a embedded version of the SSAS engine inside PBIRS,but that is only used for running .pbix based reports.

But In one of my client server SSAS services are running and consuming big amount of memory. Can we able to run the reports even after stopping the SSAS services?

Kindly clarify my doubts.?

[d_gosbell]

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@bobjSrikanth wrote:

But In one of my client server SSAS services are running and consuming big amount of memory. Can we able to run the reports even after stopping the SSAS services?

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So you will not see the SSAS instance that is part of Power BI Report Server listed in the windows services, it is an internal process entirely managed by Power BI Report Server and if you attempt to stop it all your pbix reports will stop working.

If you can see SSAS listed in the Windows services then this must be a separate instance of SSAS which someone has installed and if it is using a lot of memory that would be because it is hosting data models of some sort and if you stop this any reports using these models will break also.

But is this memory usage causing you issues? When SSAS is using memory it means your data is cached and ready for fast queries.

Report Server handles this dynamically and will unload models that are not used and if a model is not in memory, but is needed in order to render a report it will dynamically load it.

Standalone SSAS on the other hand (if running in tabular mode) will keep all models in memory at all times. So you might want to delete any data models from the server that are no longer in use.

[MartinBarta]

If you want to connect to embedded SSAS in PBIRS you can. Search for port number in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Report Server\PBIRS\ASEngine\workspaces\msmdsrv.ini -  <Port>5132</Port>. Or find the PID of msmdsrv.exe running process and in cmd start this "netstat /ano | findstr “13944”.

If you are a local admin you are able to connect with the local Management Studio (remote is not allowed but it could be about another change in .ini file only) and add any user or group to the security of SSAS instance.

Best Regards,

Martin

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

No, SSAS as a separate service which you can deploy custom models developed in SSDT is not a part of PBIRS. For that you would need to install SSAS from the SQL Server installer.

There is a embedded version of the SSAS engine inside PBIRS, but that is only used for running .pbix based reports. You cannot connect to that from other machines and you cannot deploy custom models to that instance. It's completely managed internally by PBIRS.