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 :)
