Analysis Services KPIs and Reporting Services 2008 R2

There was a comment on my last blog post by Peter Eb asking about whether Reporting Services 2008 R2 knows how to render SSAS KPIs automatically. The short answer is that it doesn’t unfortunately, but there are only a few steps needed to get it working.

For this blog post I’ve built a simple report that uses the Adventure Works DW 2008 R2 Analysis Services database as a data source. The first step is to build a data set that contains a query that references the Month attribute and the Channel Revenue KPI:

I’m interested in reporting on the status and trend part of the KPI, so I’ve added the month and value parts of the KPI, plus blank columns for the status and the trend:

For the status and the trend columns, the next step is then to drag on (or right click and insert) an indicator in each of the cells. This is when the manual steps come in:

1. Right click on the indicator to open the properties window;
2. Set the Value of the indicator to be the Status part of the Analysis Services KPI;
3. Change the States Measurement Unit to Numeric;
4. Configure the indicator Start and End properties to be -1, 0 and 1. SSAS KPIs can have an unlimited number of status values, so it may be necessary to add more states here if SSAS returns more than 3 values for the Status.

This changes that are needed to the indicator properties window is shown below:

Applying the same method to the Trend part of the KPI produces the following simple report:

This post wasn’t really supposed to compare SSRS Vs PerformancePoint Services, but I’ve found out that PerformancePoint Services does pick up the SSAS KPI meta data (slight mismatch on the colours only), saving you having to set up the indicator yourself:

It’s a shame that the KPIs aren’t picked up automatically by SSRS, but then again the above process isn’t too difficult to master.