SharePoint Server 2013 Monitoring and Troubleshooting

SharePoint Server 2013 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Basics
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Tim Warner, and I'm your trainer for the course, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Monitoring and Troubleshooting. The name of this first module is SharePoint Server 2013 Monitoring and Troubleshooting basics. It's my intention that this course is going to give you a high degree of return on investment. If you're currently a SharePoint farm administrator, then you need to know the skills that I'm going to transfer over the next six modules or so. Our specific goals in this module are first, I want you to look at the course from a bird's eye perspective and we'll figure out together how you can use it to the greatest or best effect. I also want to familiarize you with some of the lingo that's used, the terminology in other words, that Microsoft uses with SharePoint, specifically in terms of monitoring, troubleshooting, and updating the product. As far as skills are concerned, we're looking at two. First, approaches for documenting your SharePoint farm. Do you know at a glance, or could you produce documentation if you were asked today as far as which servers in your environment are running SharePoint, which servers are designated as web front-ends versus app servers, what are your SQL servers looking like and how are those arranged. Documentation is crucial, and it forms a resource that we use during our monitoring and troubleshooting. We'll also look at the sticky wicket or thicket, or I'm in a rhyming mood I guess, but we'll look at the issue, let's just put it that way, of patching or updating SharePoint Server 2013. Just that idea of updating SharePoint is probably enough to make many of you feel a little bit nervous, and there's some good reasons for that, so that's some useful information, best practices, demo, etc. Enough preliminaries, let's get into the content and let's have some fun while we learn.

Learning From the SharePoint Health Analyzer
Hi there, and welcome to Pluralsight. Tim Warner here, welcoming you to the module entitled Learning From the SharePoint Health Analyzer. As promised, we're going to begin our in-depth consideration of SharePoint Monitoring and Troubleshooting by stepping into the proverbial, shallow end of the pool. We're going to get to know the SharePoint Health Analyzer, sometimes called SPHA in the literature. We're going to understand what its purpose is, we're going to understand how to review and benefit from the suggestions, the rules and jobs that comprise the Health Analyzer, and above all else, my friend, I'm going to hopefully convince you not to ignore the Health Analyzer. I know too many SharePoint administrators who simply dismiss the Health Analyzer out of hand and find it more of an annoyance than a help. I'm hoping to change your mind about that. And we'll finish with just a brief consideration of the extensibility of Health Analyzer. This is an extensible framework. You can actually, if you're a. NET programmer, create your own custom rules and tailor Health Analyzer to your farm even more than it already is, very cool stuff. Let's get started.

Implementing Usage and Health Data Collection
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight. This is Tim Warner here, welcoming you to the module entitled Implementing SharePoint Server 2013 Usage and Health Data Collection. If you've been with me throughout this training course, that is to say you've been watching the modules sequentially, your first thought might be, Tim, I thought you taught us about the health logs, the ULS logs already, are we really going to retread that ground? My answer is no, not exactly, and I'm going to explain myself momentarily. For now let me say that we've gathered in this module to learn what the usage and health data collection service application is, how we can configure it and use it to best effect in our SharePoint farm. We'll also learn from a practical standpoint how we can view both usage and health data at various scopes, in other words at the farm level, at the site collection level, and the individual site level, and finally, we'll turn our attention to PerfMon, also called the Windows Performance Monitor. This is a tool that's been around for many years, as far back as I go in Windows administration, which is 1997, PerfMon has be beat even there, it's bene around for a long time. It's crucial that you understand how to use this tool to generate performance baselines for SharePoint. Let's get started.

Investigating SharePoint Server 2013 Network Traffic
Hello, and welcome to Pluralsight. Tim Warner here, introducing you to the module entitled, Investigating SharePoint Server 2013 Network Traffic. Our goals for this module are as follows. I want you to be comfortable in characterizing the different types of SharePoint network traffic that are present in a busy SharePoint farm. Now I say busy SharePoint farm. Notice that I'm not necessarily saying a small, medium or large farm. Even the smallest of environments is going to have a metric ton, if you don't mind the misuse of mathematics, of network traffic traversing your wired and potentially wireless Ethernet infrastructure. It's crucial that by the end of this module you be familiar with the major network protocol players and how those protocols can translate into actual problems that your users experience, and that you as a SharePoint farm administrator want to track down the root cause of, perform your analysis, perform your fix, and make sure that that problem doesn't happen again in the future. The theory is one side, practice is the other. I also want to introduce you with tools that we can use to visualize the network traffic on our network. We're going to look at both inbox tools, like the Developer Dashboard that's part of SharePoint Server 2013, IIS Failed Request Tracing that's part of IIS 7, 8, and all the most recent versions of the Internet Information Services, as well as some first and third-party external tools, including Microsoft Message Analyzer, which is formerly known as network monitor or Netmon. Let's get started.