Among the many cool features of BI xPress is the extensive and robust Auditing Framework available right out of the box. With the BI xPress Auditing Framework, a user can track errors, warnings, row counts, variable, connections, source queries, and many other package properties. Whether you’re applying this incredible Auditing Framework to a single package, a dozen packages, or 100 packages, stepping through the wizard only takes a few moments. In this post, I’m going to walk you through applying the Auditing Framework to an SSIS package.
We’ve got a simple package that loads a dimension in a small data warehouse based on the Cash For Clunkers data.
Now lets add the BI xPress Auditing Framework. To apply the Auditing Framework, I can simple right-click the package in the Solution Explorer and select Add/Remove Auditing Framework (BI xPress).
This will launch the Auditing Framework Wizard. After clicking Next on the opening screen of the wizard, select the option to apply the Auditing Framework. Likewise, you can remove the Auditing Framework by selecting the other option. Click Next.
Select which packages you’d like to apply the Auditing Framework to. You can select packages in a File System, on a SQL Server, or in an SSIS project to name a few locations.
Click Next. Now you’ll have to create the Auditing database or select the Auditing database if it already exists. If you need to create the database, specify the server you want to create the database on and click the Create New Database button. Make sure you click the Create new connection button to create the Connection Manager in the SSIS Package that points to the Auditing database. You can also check the check box to create an XML Package Configuration file.
Then click the Logging Options tab. On this tab, you can specify DataFlow Logging, Variable, Connection, and other logging properties. Using these options, we can specify to log dataflow source and destinations row counts, real time data flow monitoring, connections, variables, and other properties. All of these options are selected by default so we’ll leave these selected.
On the Advanced tab, you can specify if there are any other customer user variables that you would like to log. And on the Alert Filtering tab, you can specify which warnings you do not want to log, for example any truncation warnings using the Warning Editor.
Click Next. Then click Start to apply the Auditing Framework to the package. When the process is complete, click Finish. Now that we’ve successfully added the Auditing Framework to the package, lets take a look at it.
The first thing you’ll probably notice is the new Connection Manager connecting to our Auditing database where all our auditing data is kept. Then if you open any data flow tasks, you’ll notice that they appear “jumbled up” after adding the Row Count Transforms. Simply reformat the data flow. Notice the Row Count counting rows out of the source and the second Row Count transform counting rows into the destination. The row count info is stored in variable.
This information is then written to our database using tasks located in our SSIS package’s Event Handlers, such as OnError, OnWarning, OnPreExecute, OnPostExecute, and possibly in the OnVariableValueChanged Event Handler if you specified to track variable change history.
Now that we’ve applied the Auditing Framework, I’ve deployed the package to my server and executed it a few times in order to create a history of executions. One of the really cool things about BI xPress is that after applying the Auditing Frameworks we can watch our SSIS packages execute on the server as if we were watching them in BIDS! To open the BI xPress Monitoring Console, click the BI xPress menu in BIDS and select SSIS Monitoring Console.
In the SSIS Monitoring Console, one of many reports you can use to troubleshoot your SSIS package executions is the Execution Control Flow Diagram. We can watch the Control Flow and Data Flow while the package executes on the server. Any Errors and Warnings that occur will be instantly visible and we can also see the values of logged package variables. To see a full list of all the reports available right out of the box, click this link.
The BI xPress Auditing Framework is unlike any other out of the box framework available. It’s complete and thorough and gives us, as SSIS developers, more than Microsoft ever dreamed in regards to SSIS troubleshooting. To download a free trial of BI xPress, visit PragmaticWorks.com.
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One of the most powerful features of BI xPress is the Auditing Framework, which allows you to apply a standardized and robust auditing framework to multiple packages in just a few clicks. I’ve blogged about the BI xPress Auditing Framework before because its an extremely impressive tool that has saved me and the teams I’ve worked with countless hours. But now that SQL Server 2012 has been released, we have a whole slew of execution and performance data available to us natively within the 2012 SSIS Catalog. Wouldn’t it be great if we could view the native execution and performance data within the BI xPress Monitoring Console even if the BI xPress Auditing Framework has not been applied? 
And the really nice part is that you can turn on Auto Importing so that the native performance and execution data will be automatically imported into the BI xPress database!
