3.3. Reporting
The Reporting section of the Monitoring category is used to manage two primary aspects of monitoring:
logging and reporting. SharePoint 2010 provides significant
improvements in both of these areas. You can use the settings provided
to configure and view administrative and health reports that were
generated based on logging settings you can also define here.
3.3.1. View Administrative Reports
The Administrative
Reports page contains a document library that holds administrator
reports that are generated by your logging configurations. The reports
you will find in this library will depend on the services that are
running and the configuration of the logging options, which are also
located on the Administrative Reports page.
3.3.2. Configure diagnostic logging
You use the Diagnostic Logging page to configure the amount of diagnostic logging that will be captured using the Unified
Logging Service (ULS). You can control the types of events, severity of
events, repeating events, and log information including file location,
size of logs, and how long to retain the logs. There are more than 20
different categories that you can choose to log information about, and
each of them contains more granular options for specifying the types of
events to log within the category, as shown in Figure 32.
Use the following steps to configure diagnostic logging.
Click Configure Diagnostic Logging under Reporting on the Monitoring page.
Select the main category of each event type you want to log.
Select either all or specific items within each category.
Select the least critical event level that you want to record in the event log.
Select the least critical event level that you want to report to the trace log.
Event Flood protection
allows the ULS logging mechanism to identify repeating logging
activities for the same event and suppress the event to prevent the log
from filling up with the same alert that might be occurring every five
seconds.
Your selection of events and the reporting
levels have a direct impact on the size of your log files and the
performance of your system. It is a best practice to store your log
files on a separate disk, which can be specified in the Path option
shown in Figure 33.
You can also configure the length of time the files are retained as
well as the amount of disk space in gigabytes (GB) that can be consumed
by the log files.
3.3.3. Configure Usage and Health Data Collection
You use usage logging to
generate reports that show how your system is being used. After enabling
usage logging, you specify which events you want logged, as shown in Figure 34.
Similar to diagnostic
logging, after you enable usage logging you can specify the location of
the log files generated and the maximum amount of disk space that can be
consumed by the logs in gigabytes, as shown in Figure 35.
In addition to those settings, you can also choose to enable or disable
health data collection as well as configure the schedule for health and
log collection. The log collection is the timer job that runs to gather
the information stored in the log files and then copy it into the SQL
Server logging database. The SQL Server instance hosting the logging
database and the name of the database are also displayed. The default
database name is Wss_logging, and by default it contains the following
information from all servers in the farm.
ULS logs
Event logs
Select Performance Monitor counters
Blocking SQL queries
SQL DMV (Dynamic Management Views) queries
Feature usage
Information on search crawling and querying
Inventory of all site collections
Timer job usage
