Whenever you are introduced to a new environment, either because you visit a new client or take over a new position from someone else, it’s always crucial to get on top of what’s going on. More often than not, any documentation (if you are lucky to even get hands on that) is out of date or not properly maintained. So going through that may even end up making you even more confused – or in worst case; misinformed.
In a previous engagement of mine came a request from the Data Architecture team. I was asked to produce a list of all servers and cubes running in a specific environment. They provided the list of servers and wanted to know which servers were hit by running solutions. Along with this information the team also needed all sorts of information on the connection strings from the Data Source Views, as well as which credentials were used, if possible.
If you’re dealing with a large number of cubes, this becomes even more useful.