SPJeff

I saw this today and was completely confused because I had literally just finished creating the Service Application in PowerShell and knew it was successful.   The root cause was a missing Service Connection.  Creating the SA was only the first step, I also need to associate it to the default proxy group.  Fiddler was handy here to quickly isolate the error.   I actually wrote PowerShell code that that but seem to have lost it during a VM snapshot restore, urg.

Cannot connect to PerformancePoint Services. Contact the administrator for more details.

Other possible causes:

• Central Admin > Missing a Performance Point Service Application?  Make sure you have one.
• Site Collection Feature > PerformancePoint Services needs to be active.   I use the Business Intelligence Center template to make this easier.
• TCP/HTTP.  Don’t forget basic connectivity.  If you are using multiple servers make sure you can reach the remote host, use Fiddler to watch the connection attempt