How to monitor SharePoint? - Part -1

Monitoring- Looks very simple, isn’t it? J One of the most debatable / discussable topic in today’s SharePoint market but let me tell you guys, this terminology has a very broad scope and that’s why big organizations invest heavily on third party tools to get appropriate output as per the desired requirement.

1.   Why the monitoring has so much importance?

2.   Why the monitoring has gain a huge demand right from the day 1 of the SharePoint birth?

3.   Is this monitoring – a need of the time?

4.   Don’t we have out of box (OOB) monitoring options available?

5.   Why we are so dependent on the third party tools? Just because these tools are simplifying your output in an easy manner?  

Why monitoring is needed in SharePoint?

a)   To ensure the availability and reliability

b)   To identify potential errors before an error causes problems

c)   To notify administrators when problems occur

In this today’s article, we will explore the default monitoring options / OOB options which need to be evaluated properly so that we can use them in an appropriate manner.

First of all- Let me share the CORE OPTIONS that we can use OOB-

A.   Diagnostic logging

B.   SharePoint Health analyzer

C.   Usage data and health data collection

D.   SharePoint Developer Dashboard

Every core options has so many nested sub sections that I am going to share now-

Diagnostic logging:

Diagnostic logging / ULS logs- pretty useful utility in terms of troubleshooting any issues. ULS logs will give you the root cause behind the actual issue. SharePoint tracing service is responsible for the creation of ULS logs, If this service gets stopped then you won’t be able to see the ULS logs so make sure this service always in started mode.

Where you will find this service:

Start -> Run -> Services.msc -> SharePoint Tracing Service.

Where you will find the ULS logs:

C:\Program Files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Logs

Note: If you have customized the location then you will find in different drive but path will be same.

Which tool will be useful to analyze the ULS logs: ULSViewer.exe

You can download from here: http://ulsviewer.codeplex.com/

Where you will find this section in SharePoint?

a)   Open the Central Administration

b)   Monitoring

c)   Configure diagnostic logging

d)   Select all Categories

e)   Select the following default settings-

§  Least critical event to report to the event log - Warning

§  Least critical event to report to the trace log – Unexpected

f)    Enable this option- Enable Event Log Flood Protection

g)   In the path section, you can configure the location where you want to store the logs

h)   Number of days setting which specifies the log validity.

SharePoint Health Analyzer (SHA):-

SHA is equally important; in fact I can say this is so powerful which will give your complete statistics of your SP environment.  This tool is an enhancement / introduced in this SP 2010 version as it was not there in SharePoint 2007/previous versions.

What’s the specialty of this tool?

a.    Identifies problems

b.    Recommends solutions

c.    Repairs the functionality itself

d.   Automatically resolves the problem

e.    These checks run on an hourly / daily / weekly or even monthly basis.

Where you will find this utility in SharePoint?

a.    Open the Central Administration

b.    Monitoring section

c.    Health Analyzer

d.   Review problems and solutions

Who is working under the HOOD?

Curious to know- Right? These rules and alerts are based on Timer Jobs so basically there are so many jobs are running in the background that runs on daily/weekly/hourly/monthly basis.

Still writing on the remaining two core sections that I will cover in the next post. Stay tuned :)

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, Thank you.