Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 and 2013

1. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Baltimore SharePoint User
Group June 2015
Correlation or Bust?
Tips and Tricks for Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010/2013
By
Toby McGrail – Senior SharePoint Consultant

2. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Agenda
• Introduction
• What are Correlation IDs?
• Diagnostic Logging
• Usage and Health Data Collection
• Health Analyzer
• Developer Dashboard
• Tools
• PowerShell Commands
• Demo of Tools
• Crawl Logs
• Monitoring
• Custom Pages
• IIS App Pools and Sites
• Counters and Thresholds
• Performance
• Network
• Client/Browser Issues
• Wrap Up
• Questions?

3. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Introduction
Toby McGrail – Senior SharePoint Consultant for HP Enterprise Services. 8
Years SharePoint Experience
Outside of SharePoint I have balanced lifestyle that includes my family,
friends, and Fitness. Fitness and SharePoint are my passion.
Over 25 years IT Experience

4. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
What is a Correlation ID?
Correlation Ids are GUIDs assigned to events which transpire during the lifecycle of a resource
request. As problems occur, the Correlation Id is commonly surfaced within the context of an error
when presented to the person initiating the request or through the Developer Dashboard.
You may have seen a message like the ones below in SharePoint 2010 or 2013
SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2013

5. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Diagnostic Logging - Overview
• The primary goal of monitoring is to ensure a healthy SharePoint Environment
so that you can achieve service performance objectives such as short response
time.
• You can use the monitoring features from the SharePoint Central Administration
and PowerShell scripts to monitor the SharePoint Environment and services.
• Logs and reports track SharePoint Environment and service status.
• You can read the logs from the logging database. The advantage of using
logging database is that you can configure your view and export the logs to
Excel.
• The logs and reports from Central Administration help you understand how
the SharePoint 2013 system is running, analyze and repair problems, and
view metrics for the sites.
• Log Levels
• Trace Logs
• Event Throttling

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Log Levels – Event Logging
• It is important that you choose an appropriate severity level. The severity level of an event
is displayed in the Windows Event Log and is used by administrators and registered by
monitoring tools to indicate how severe or important an event is. Choosing an appropriate
level is a key part of the health and monitoring design for your component or system.
• Now to the Levels
• Critical Error - Events that demand the immediate attention of the system
administrator. They are generally directed at the global (system-wide) level, such as
System or Application. They can also be used to indicate that an application or
system has failed or stopped responding.
• Error - Events that indicate problems, but in a category that does not require
immediate attention.
• Warning -Events that provide forewarning of potential problems; although not a
response to an actual error, a warning indicates that a component or application is
not in an ideal state and that some further actions could result in a critical error.
• Information - Events that pass noncritical information to the administrator, similar to a
note that says: "For your information.“
• Verbose - Verbose status, such as progress or success messages.

7. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Log Levels – Trace (ULS) Logging
• When writing a trace log by using the ULS API, you must specify a severity level. The severity level is
displayed in the ULS trace log and is commonly used by reporting or filtering tools. For this reason, it is
important to choose an appropriate level.
• Now to the Levels
• Unexpected - Similar to an Assert (an assumption in code that a condition is true at a particular point),
this message indicates that a logic check failed that is atypical, or the message returns an unexpected
error code. These generally represent code bugs that should be investigated and fixed.
• Monitorable - Traces that indicate a problem, but do not need immediate investigation. The intent is to
collect data and analyze it over time, looking for problem trends.
• High - General functional detail, the high priority events that happen in the environment. Examples
include global configuration modifications, service start and stop, timer jobs completed, and so on
• Medium - Useful to help support or test teams debug customer or environmental issues. These likely
include messages indicating that individual features have succeeded or failed, such as creating a new
list, modifying a page, and so on.
• Verbose - Useful primarily to help developers debug low-level code failures. Not generally useful to
anyone who does not have access to source code or symbols. Most event tracing that does not need to
be enabled all the time should be set at the Verbose level.

8. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Usage and Health Data Collection
• SharePoint stores Usage and Health Information in Files and in a Database.
• Consumes disk space and has a huge effect on Performance. Remember that
these files can fill up server space if not configured correctly. Always remember
to set a limit and don’t make it unlimited or you will see your disk space
disappear rapidly
• Something that needs to be managed closely and includes:
• Health Data Collection – Lots of timer jobs to monitor and maintain
• Log Collection – Timer Job to copy events from files into the Database

9. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Health Analyzer
• Identifies possible problems and gives the Farm Admin Possible solutions
• Some of the Solutions have the Repair Now however in most cases they don’t
work or are not “Best Practices”
• Applies a set of rules that can be extended or in most Environments customized
to the needs of the Farm
• Rules are applied for some of the following categories
• Security
• Performance
• Configuration
• Availability
• Timer Jobs perform these monitoring tasks and collect the monitoring data
• Some of these notifications are not always helpful but more time consuming than
anything else
• Some of the alerts however are also very useful in finding potential issues that you would
only find by monitoring the ULS Logs

10. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Developer Dashboard
• Don’t be fooled by the name its more a tool to help you troubleshoot problems and
performance issues
• Easily Troubleshoot Problems with Page Rendering
• Three Types of modes that you need to be aware of
• Off - Not Displayed
• On – Rendering on Each and Every Page
• OnDemand – Hidden until you manually click on the Developer Dashboard
Icon
• Granular Control on Visibility provided – Users that have Customization
permissions by default
• Great way to Monitor Custom Code when the Developer uses the
SPMonitoredScope Tag – It’s a great idea to make your solutions use this tag.
• Use PowerShell to enable DD.
• $ds= [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperD
ashboardSettings
$ds.DisplayLevel = 'OnDemand'
$ds.TraceEnabled = $true
$ds.Update()``

11. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Developer Dashboard
There are 6 report sections which provide you with lots of stats and data
.

12. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Tools
SharePoint Management Console
Wireshark
SharePoint Diagnostic Toolkit - SPDiag
Developer Dashboard
PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs
SharePoint Diagnostic Studio
Fiddler
Performance Monitor
ULS Viewer

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PowerShell Commands
When running updates don’t use the GUI use PowerShell
PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install
-cmd installfeatures
Configure ULS and Data Collection through PowerShell
Set-SPDiagnosticConfig -LogLocation D:DiagnosticLogs
Set-SPDiagnosticConfig –LogMaxDiskSpaceUsageEnabled
PowerShell should be your best friend. Its faster and more reliable. Create custom script
files to save you time.
Example –Restart SPServices – Custom solution we have built to restart all
SharePoint services throughout farm

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Demo of Tools
SharePoint Toolkit/Diagnostic Studio
ULS Viewer
Developer Dashboard
PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs

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Sharepoint toolkit/Diagnostic
Studio
To download the Toolkit go to the following URL
SharePoint 2010 - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=196866
SharePoint 2013 – Not yet available but supposedly is in the works. Many third party
have these available for a small fee. However the 2010 version works on 2013. I
have used it for about a year without any issues.

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ULS Viewer

17. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Crawl Logs
Only visible within the Central Administration Site
Relies on Crawl Log for Search Application
Important to Monitor this log regular so that your crawl is effectively crawling all the
content
Remember to Look for Top Level Errors and fix them immediately
Top Level documents especially start addresses
Virtual Servers
Content DB

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Monitoring
HTTP “Ping is a useful command but doesn’t help when troubleshooting
Remember SharePoint implements custom error messages. (AKA the Correlation ID error
message or the 2013 Error Message (Working on it)
Most common error codes 404 and 401 can be hidden
Develop a page that checks SharePoint Services

19. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Custom Pages
Create Custom Pages to allow for more in depth logging.
Example HTTP Throttling for Performance Issue
Custom Error Page to help Admin and Support with user with important data
Corraleation ID
Web Front End Server
Time of Error
User affected
Log Name

20. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
IIS App Pools and Sites
Common Issues with SharePoint App Pools
IIS Resets not done correctly
No Recycling or Restarting of App Pools
IIS Website is stopped
Create Task to have App Pools recycled daily and restarted once a week. Also have them
restart automatically
IIS Logging to see why App Pools and Sites have stopped or is not responding.

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Counters and Thresholds
Processor Utilization – Not to exceed 80 Percent but ideally under 50 Percent
Available Memory – Greater then 10 Percent
Disk Latency Less then 25 MS but ideal situation is 15 MS
SQL Server is more like 10 MS

22. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Network Troubleshooting
SharePoint is Fast on Server but slow on client
Slow only across VPN Clients
Slow on Server and Client. Communication Issue with SQL Server is most likely the issue
Networking Tools
Microsoft Network Monitoring
Wireshark

23. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Client/Browser Issues
Is the issue across the network or just one or very few users experience the issues
Make sure that all clients are at Organization approved browser level
SharePoint relies heavily on JavaScript
Older Browser deliver poor user adoption and/or support
IE9 and IE10 are much faster and more reliable
Firefox Version 5 or later. Not all SharePoint features work in Firefox

24. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Wrap Up
Know your Environment – Troubleshooting starts here!
Performance Baselines help detect and limit issues and problems
Monitoring is the Key!
Pay attention to Log Files – Both Event and ULS Logs. ULS Viewer should become
your best friend next to PowerShell.
Tools
SPDiag – Helps Troubleshooting SharePoint
PAL – Helps with Server Health
Diagnose one issue at a time! Don’t always trust google when implementing a
solution. Thoroughly test in dev and/or test environments before moving it to the
Production Farm.

25. © Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
Questions
Do you have any issues that you have seen that we have not covered
My Blog
http://tobymcgrail.com:2020/SPADMIN
References
PAL – http://pal.codeplex.com
SharePoint Diagnostic Studio -http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh144782.aspx
TechNet
Contact Information:
Toby McGrail – toby.mcgrail@hp.com
Twitter - @SPTOBY1