Performing Administrative Tasks Using Central Administration (part 20) - View Health Report

3.3.4. View Health Report

After enabling usage reporting and defining the schedule, and after the timer job has run to generate your logs, you can view two reports from the View Health Report page. You can select the type of report to display by clicking either Slowest Pages or Top Active Users, options available at the upper left of the page. Both reports allow you to filter the information that is presented by specifying options using the following drop-downs menus.

• Server Display information from all servers or a specific one.

• Web Application Display information from all Web applications or a specific one.

• Show Items Specify the number of items to show on each page; options are 25 (default), 50, or 100.

• Range Specify the time frame of the information to display; options are Last Day (default), Last Week, or Last Month.

After you select the options you want to see, click Go to view the report.

The column headings of each report can be used to sort the content based on that heading. For instance, if you want to view the Slowest Pages report by Average Duration beginning with the lowest average, you can click the Average Duration column heading to perform the sort. Clicking it a second time will sort it in the reverse order.

Slowest Pages Report Using the filtering options you select, the Slowest Pages report provides information about each page that has been accessed and provides some access statistics. An example of a Slowest Pages report is shown in Figure 36. The Slowest Pages report contains the following columns of information about the pages, which all can be viewed using the horizontal scroll bar.

• URL of the page

• Average Duration (seconds)

• Minimum Duration (seconds)

• Maximum Duration (seconds)

• Average Database Queries (count)

• Minimum Database Queries (count)

• Maximum Database Queries (count)

• Number of Requests

Top Active Users Report Using the filtering options you select, the Top Active Users report, such as the one shown in Figure 37, provides the following information about the users accessing your farm.

• User

• Number of requests

• Last access time

• Percentage of successful requests

Developer Dashboard

There is a developer dashboard that you can activate to display more detailed diagnostics concerning an activity, such as page load times, and can help you identify performance issues. You can enable the developer dashboard to constantly display detailed diagnostics, or you can choose to manage when this information is displayed by adding a developer dashboard button on your SharePoint interface. By default, the dashboard is disabled, but you can activate it using Windows PowerShell or STSADM by using the appropriate set of commands. The following sets of commands show you how to install the on-demand developer dashboard first using STSADM and then using Windows PowerShell.

STSADM

Stsadm -o getproperty -pn developer-dashboard
Stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv ondemand

Windows PowerShell

$wa = [microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebapplication]::lookup("$args")
$ws = $wa.webservice
$dd = $ws.developerdashboardsettings
$dd.displaylevel =
   [microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spdeveloperdashboardlevel]::OnDemand
$dd.update()

					  

To display the additional diagnostic information all the time, you use the same commands, but instead of specifying ondemand as the developer dashboard type, you provide a command to create an on/off icon that enables and disables the dashboard as needed.

You use the icon to toggle between displaying and hiding additional detailed diagnostics. When you choose to display the dashboard, you will see information similar to what is shown in Figure 39.

But wait—it gets even better. If you click one of the options in the Database Queries section of the developer dashboard or click one of the items in the SPRequest Allocations, you will see even more information. For instance, if you click SELECT TOP(@NUMROWS) under Database Queries, you will see another page that contains the following three sections.

• Query Text

• Callstack

• IO Stats

You can use this additional information for in-depth troubleshooting or to analyze the performance of your system.