Monitoring overview (SharePoint Foundation 2010)
Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010
The monitoring features in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 help you to understand how the SharePoint Foundation 2010 system is running, analyze and repair problems, and view metrics for the sites. Monitoring the SharePoint Foundation 2010 environment includes the following tasks:
Configuring the various aspects of monitoring to suit business needs.
Monitoring the environment and resolving any problems that might arise.
Viewing reports and logs of the environment activity.
In this article:
Configuring monitoring
Monitoring the farm and resolving problems
Viewing and using reports and logs
Configuring monitoring
SharePoint Foundation 2010 comes installed with default settings for its monitoring features. However, you might want to change some of these settings to better suit the business needs. The aspects that you might change configuration settings for include diagnostic logging and health and usage data collection.
Diagnostic logging
SharePoint Foundation 2010 collects data in the diagnostic log that can be useful in troubleshooting. The default settings are sufficient for most situations, but depending upon the business needs and lifecycle of the farm, you might want to change these settings. For example, if you are deploying a new feature or making large-scale changes to the environment, you might want to change the logging level to either a more verbose level, to capture as much data about the state of the system during the changes, or to a lower level to reduce the size of the log and the resources needed to log the data. For more information and best practices, see Configure diagnostic logging (SharePoint Foundation 2010).
Health and usage data collection
The monitoring features in SharePoint Foundation 2010 use specific timer jobs to perform monitoring tasks and collect monitoring data. The health and usage data might consist of performance counter data, event log data, timer service data, metrics for site collections and sites, search usage data, or various performance aspects of the Web servers. The system uses this data to create health reports, Web Analysis reports, and administrative reports. The system writes usage and health data to the logging folder and to the logging database.
A timer job is a trigger to start to run a specific Windows service for one of the SharePoint 2010 products. It contains a definition of the service to run and specifies how frequently the service should be started. The Windows SharePoint Services Timer v4 service (SPTimerV4) runs timer jobs. Many features in SharePoint 2010 products rely on timer jobs to run services according to a schedule.
You might want to change the schedules that the timer jobs run on to collect data more frequently or less frequently. You might even want to disable jobs that collect data that you are not interested in. You can perform the following tasks on timer jobs:
Modify the schedule that the timer job runs on.
Run timer jobs immediately.
Enable or disable timer jobs.
View timer job status. You can view currently scheduled jobs, failed jobs, currently running jobs, and a complete timer job history.
For more information about configuring these settings, see Configure SharePoint Health Analyzer timer jobs (SharePoint Foundation 2010).
Monitoring the farm and resolving problems by using SharePoint Health Analyzer
SharePoint Foundation 2010 includes a new, integrated health analysis tool that is named SharePoint Health Analyzer that enables you to check for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems. SharePoint Health Analyzer runs predefined health rules against servers in the farm. A health rule runs a test and returns a status that tells you the outcome of the test. When any rule fails, the status is written to the Health Reports list in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and to the Windows Event log. The SharePoint Health Analyzer also creates an alert in the Health Analyzer Reports list on the Review problems and solutions page in Central Administration. You can click an alert to view more information about the problem and see steps to resolve the problem. You can also open the rule that raised the alert and change its settings.
Like all SharePoint Foundation 2010 lists, you can edit Health Analyzer Reports list items, create custom views, export the list items into Microsoft Excel, subscribe to the RSS feed for the list, and many other tasks. Each health rule falls in one of the following categories: Security, Performance, Configuration, or Availability.
A health rule can be run on a defined schedule or on an impromptu basis. All health rules are available through Central Administration, on the Monitoring page, for either immediate or scheduled execution.
For more information about the health rules and how to troubleshoot problems in SharePoint Foundation 2010, see SharePoint Health Analyzer rules reference (SharePoint Foundation 2010).
Farm administrators can configure specific health rules to do the following:
Enable or disable rules.
Configure rules to run on a predefined schedule.
Define the scope where the rules run.
Receive e-mail alerts when problems are found.
Run rules an impromptu basis.
For more information about configuring these settings, see Configure usage and health data collection (SharePoint Foundation 2010).
Viewing and using reports and logs
SharePoint Foundation 2010 can be configured to collect data and create reports about server status and site use. You perform the following using reporting:
View administrative reports, such as search reports.
Create and review Information Management Policy Usage reports.
View health reports that include slowest pages and top active pages.
View Web Analytics reports that include Web site traffic reports, search query reports, and customized reports.
See Also
Concepts
Configuring monitoring (SharePoint Foundation 2010)
Solving problems and troubleshooting (SharePoint Foundation 2010)