Can someone help explain the following error message? We get it when connecting from Excel pivot tables to Azure Analysis Services (AAS) .
"Resolution of actual cluster endpoint of Azure Analysis Server: ' ' failed. Response from Server:,
Technical Details :
Root Activity :
Date (UTC) :
Eventually the error went away when I repeatedly tested my pivot table for ten minutes.
I'd like to understand the internal components in Azure that generate such a confusing error. Hopefully there is something that customers can do to investigate, since Microsoft doesn't advertise their service outages very widely .... unless they are "globally impacting" all of their customers (eg. like when AAD went offline around the world last week).
Is this message indicating an outage in AAS itself or is there some other component(s) involved. Note that I was able to connect from SSMS, but not from Excel pivot tables.
If Microsoft were to decide to post a service health alert about this type of message, what service would it be listed under? AAS? Or some type of DNS?
Any clues would be appreciated. I'd like to understand the underlying issue and be able to predict how long it will normally take for these errors to clear up, once we've encountered them.
There are client libraries that Excel uses to connect to AAS. The libraries are based on OLEDB and they are used for connecting to "MSOLAP" which is a term used for both multidimensional and tabular cubes. Depending on whether you are using the x86 or x64 version of Excel, you will need to find and install a different package to deploy the latest libraries to your machine.
I was instructed to install the latest libraries that are available here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/analysis-services/client-libraries
Updates to the libraries can become available on a regular basis, and it is important to keep your client libraries up to date if you are connecting to azure resources (since they may be changing on a regular basis as well. )
After updating the client libraries, I no longer encounter the obscure message when I run my repro. Moreover, I'm able to simulate connectivity problems and I am now getting more meaningful errors.
As I started working with Microsoft support, they were able to determine that the original message ("Resolution of actual cluster endpoint of Azure Analysis Server failed") was most likely an authentication issue (expired token or similar). Apparently this error happens for a small handful of reasons .
Internally there are a couple steps that happen while Excel pivot tables are authenticating to AAS. The first step retrieves a token from an identity service using an ADAL library, and the next one uses the token to establish a connection to AAS.
I am happy for the help from Azure support to clear this up. Hopefully this information will help others as well. The moral of the story is that Azure services (like AAS) can change over time, and so you must keep updating your local client libraries so that they don't have any integration failures and they don't generate incoherent error messages.