Analysis Service connectivity error due to SQL Browser service

 

Today some of my SSIS packages were failing to connect to Analysis servicesserver with the following error, 

 

Analysis Services Processing Task: A connection cannot be made to redirector. Ensure that 'SQL Browser' service is running.

  

This was a new package and source and destination analysis services were installed recently, Once I got the error I double checked and found the browser service was running fine on both source and destination even weird was I did not configure any port for SSAS and it was connecting to default TCP 2383 which should not have caused any issue. I double checked the SQL Port configuration again on the servers and it looked as below,

 

 

 

The Port configuration ‘0’ means the connection should go through the default port 2383; next thing I did was to find out if the TCP port 2383 was blocked under any firewall but it wasn’t.

 

Then I tried to connect to the SSASthrough management studio without forcing the port number it error out again with a similar error but what was interesting was it said the SSMS was trying to connect to <SERVERIP>:2382 and this port 2382 was refusing connection.

On analysis from MSDN TechNet’s I found 2382 was the port ID to which client connect to browser service to resolve SSAS ports similar to UDP port 1434 in database services. But still why are we not able to connect to this port?

 

My last option was to try connecting using explicit port number in SSMS like <Servername>:2383 instead of instance name and I was able to connect successfully. 

Now it eventually came down to the browser service connectivity issue, after several trial and error and reading many articles; it all pointed to the service account of the browser service, The Browser Service in my system was configured under local service, I changed it to a domain account with Admin access in the system and again it was erroring out with the same error. As a last try I changed the service account of Browser Service to “Local System“ VOILA!!!!! Connectivity was fine now and all my packages were running fine. I am not sure why this happens but thought it be of help to write it down for others having similar issue or someone to shed me some light on why this happens. 

 

After this error, I ended up changing the service account of Browser service on all my servers to Local System!!!!