Troubleshooting SSIS & SSRS Without Getting Lost in Logs

Did your SSIS package go "bump" in the night? Oftentimes it can be difficult, and time consuming, to troubleshoot in SSIS and SSRS, without getting lost in logs. In a recent webinar, Founder and CEO, Brian Knight, discussed how to build your own framework or use a professional 3rd party framework like BI xPress to debug a package in a fraction of the time.

If you’re like most, you have more than one server running SSIS. When problems occur, the challenge begins when you must go to each machine to look at an agent or you get agent alerts/notifications for each server to begin to diagnose the problem. If you’re relying on agent alerts, you’ll have to go to each server to diagnose packages and view the history to find the error message to diagnose – this can be a slow, arduous process.

Ideally, the best fix is to centralize all the logging into one repository (your mobile, for instance), then you can go to that one place to see reports across all your enterprises to learn which packages went “bump” in the night. You can use built-in reports in SSIS, but you will not have all reports in one central place; you’ll have to go to each machine to find the issue.

Other kinds of logging you can do is SQL Server table and Windows Event Log. In SSIS 2005 or greater, you can use the Event Handler Framework. This is completely customizable, where you can set events you always want to do on packages, pre- and post-execute. Framework also gives you flexibility to see the package name and task that failed.

The trade-off is that it can become difficult and time consuming to deploy. If you create an Event Handler and then it must be modified, you must modify the template and every package.

BI xPress simplifies development and administration. If you’re tired of creating that Event Handler Framework over and over, BI xPress will do the work for you. You can go from concept to code in about 30 seconds, and you can inject that code into 100 packages. You can also add robust auditing and notification frameworks to your packages, as well as deploy packages to production in seconds.

Brian also shows how to monitor SSRS for runaway reports. This webinar has demos to walk you through these various troubleshooting log scenarios. If you’d like to learn more about how BI xPress can speed up troubleshooting SSIS with less coding time, visit our website to download a free trial. Or call to set up a customized demo with us. We can help you troubleshoot in SSIS and SSRS, without getting lost in logs.