Why you shouldn’t stop / start Analysis Services from SCM when running in SharePoint Integration Mode

Hopefully this will be my first of many posts as I have been meaning to try and start doing memory dumps to this blog. Hopefully some of those memory dumps also made it into our docs … I tried.

So most people who are used to using Windows based services are used to using Service Control Manager (SCM) (started via services.msc) to start and stop the service. Some also use “net <stop | start>” to control the service. And in normal situations … this works great. When services are integrated and managed by SharePoint, however, this is not recommended and doing so might leave you a bit confused. This is why:

As of SharePoint 2010, they have exposed their “Services” infrastructure which was previously used only by teams like Excel Services, Access Services, … This is some of the infrastructure that PowerPivot for SharePoint hooks into. As such, if you go to System Settings in Central Admin

And chose Manage services on server you will see our service in the list:

(SQL Server Analysis Services – that is our NT Service)

(SQL Server PowerPivot System Service – that is a web service we expose on every app server which all WFE machines communicate with. No WFE components communicate directly with SSAS)

From this “Manage services on server” page, you can stop and start our server. If you do so manually you might get hit by an issue where sometime in the next hour the service magically turns back to the state it was previously in. That is because SharePoint has a HealthRule that runs every hour that checks to make sure all of the services it is managing are in the state that it expects. When SharePoint stops a service, it actually disables it to prevent a restart if the machine is rebooted. You can find this HealthRule if you go to the Monitoring section on Central Admin:

If you chose Health Analyzer – Review Rule Definitions you can find the below definition (ordering is a bit tricky):

To test this out for yourself do the following:

1) Do a “net start” from an administrative command prompt to see that “SQL Server Analysis Services (POWERPIVOT)” is running

2) Do ‘net stop “SQL Server Analysis Services (POWERPIVOT)” ‘ to turn off our service

3) Run “net start” again to see that our service is no longer running

3) Click on the job above and chose “RunNow” from the ribbon options (make sure that the SharePoint 2010 Timer service is running … this you can manage from SCM).

4) Wait a minute (I haven’t found any place that gives you “running” type progress on these jobs).

5) Run “net start” again and you will see that our service has started back up.

This can be very confusing to people who are trying to run certain types of tests. We had some people hitting this issue with regards to the “Claims to Windows Token Service” (previously called a number of things … this is the Geneva Framework Service).

Hope this helps you avoid some headaches wondering who is logging into your machine and changing the configuration

Thanks

Lee