3. Monitoring
There have been significant improvements in how you can monitor your farm in SharePoint 2010. The Monitoring
functional category provides a central location from which you can
monitor a plethora of performance, logging, and reporting information
about your farm. To help organize these features and make them easier to
use, the Monitoring functional category has been divided into three
main areas: Health Analyzer, Timer Jobs, and Reporting.
3.1. Health Analyzer
The Health Analyzer section
of the Monitoring category in Central Administration gives you the
opportunity to review and modify the predefined rules used to monitor
your farm and review any problems that are reported. In addition to
selecting how you want to review the problems, most of the problems
reported provide an option to act on the reported problem in an attempt
to resolve it.
3.1.1. Review problems and solutions
When a new service
application, Web application, or even a new SQL Server database is
created, SharePoint automatically creates the necessary monitoring
definitions for the new item using out-of-the-box configuration. These
default system-generated
definitions are used to generate and report warnings and errors that
you can view on the Review Problems And Solutions page shown in Figure 24.
The page displays any problems that have been discovered in one of the following four categories.
Configuration
Security
Performance
Availability
Within each category, you see a
list of reported problems (if there are any), and each problem in the
lists is displayed as a hyperlink, which you can click to receive more
detailed information about the problem, as shown in Figure 25.
One of the most helpful
options provided in the details view is located within the Remedy
section. It provides a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article
about the problem and some possible steps to resolve the problem. This
section and the Explanation section are the two areas that will help you
understand and resolve the problem. After attempting to resolve the
problem, you can click the Reanalyze Now icon in the Ribbon at the top
of the page to determine if the problem has been resolved.
You can view general
information about the rule of the reported problem by clicking the View
link located in the Rule Settings section. This will display a page with
details about the rule, as shown in Figure 26.
These details can be used to determine the frequency with which the
rule runs, to define an alert on the rule, or to run the rule
immediately to determine if a problem currently exists instead of
waiting until its next scheduled run.
Note:
You can also access the page with details about a rule by clicking a rule displayed on the Health Analyzer Rule Definitions page, which is shown in Figure 6-38.
3.1.2. Review rule definitions
The Health Analyzer Rule Definitions page shown in Figure 27
displays all the currently defined Health Analyzer rule definitions.
This page provides you with information about each rule including
schedule, whether the rule is enabled, and if it is configured to
attempt to repair the reported problem automatically. Definitions are
created automatically when the system detects a new service that has
defined rule definitions associated with it. When the service is
started, the definition rules will be added to the appropriate category.
Click a rule on the Health Analyzer Rule Definitions page to display details about that rule, as shown in Figure 26.
Then you can click the Edit Item icon in the Ribbon on the details page
to display the rule definition, which you can then configure, or you
can delete the rule.
Alternatively, you can
access the page where you can configure or delete a rule by selecting
the check box next to the rule on the Health Analyzer Rule Definitions
page. This will display the Ribbon with the tools that allow you to
manage the rule definition, as shown in Figure 28.
To modify the rule definition, click the Edit Item icon to display the Rule Definition Configuration page shown in Figure 29, which you can use to define the settings including schedule, scope, and automatic repair.
