SSIS/SSAS 2016 intermittent fault: An error was encountered in the transport layer

Question

I have an intermittent fault in my SSIS ETL process when I try and process my OLAP cube.

There are no error messages in the SQL log, and there's nothing else significant running at the time. The only error message I can find in the event log is:

An error was encountered in the transport layer.

SSIS and SSAS are SQL are all running locally on the same server, so I don't believe it's network related at all.

The same package has been deployed and has run successfully for weeks. If we manually connect to the cube it processes without any problem.

Windows Server 2012 R2 6.3 (Build 9600: ) on VMWare 64gb of RAM.

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Enterprise (SP1-CU1) - 13.0.4411.0 SQL Max mem = 48gb

My gut feel is that this is more of an SSIS issue than a SSAS issue.

Has anyone else encountered this? Can anyone reccomend a solution or workaround? Is it possible to get additional debugging information?

Answer 1

I think we solved this or at least found a workaround.

I believe the problem is a timeout when connecting to SSAS when it has been inactive for some time. It has nothing to do with the actual processing of the cube.

We added a step to our ETL process which queried the OLAP cube before the processing step was triggered. This causes SSAS to 'wake up' before it is needed.

Since we added this step we haven't had a repeat of this problem.