Announcing the SharePoint Diagnostic Studio

Author: Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation - SharePoint

One of the most challenging aspects of maintaining a SharePoint deployment is understanding why certain events have transpired in the environment, often IT Professionals and Developers only have access to when an event occurred and are tasked with parsing Performance Counters, Event and Diagnostic logs, or executing Transact-SQL statements against the Usage database to put the what and why to the when.  These tasks are typically accomplished through an array of tools such as Excel, Log Parser, SQL Server Management Studio and others and the IT Professional and Developer are challenged to correlate and condense this information into a meaningful format - large complex server farm environments make these tasks all the more difficult. Often the most accessible solutions are used to identify and resolve issues occurring in a server farm environment to include the SharePoint Health Analyzer and Systems Center Operations Manager.The next version (v2.0) of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit includes the new SharePoint Diagnostics Studio.  The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides a 3rd layer than can be implemented to support these processes and solutions.

In the new version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit we’ve introduced a new and revised SharePoint Diagnostics Studio that represents a complete departure from previous diagnostics toolkits.  The next generation SharePoint Diagnostics Tool, the SharePoint Diagnostics Studio, presents server diagnostic information in a visual and structured way that enables Developers and IT Professionals to quickly diagnose and act upon intermittent performance, reliability and functionality problems in a SharePoint 2010 environment.

The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio offers unprecedented depth surfacing every request, across every machine, remotely, with minimal permissions.  This depth and usage allows the IT Professional or Developer to rapidly identity and isolate issues without requiring access to the physical hardware that supports the underlying environment.

 

        The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio gathers and consolidates Event and Diagnostic (ULS) logs in addition to information from the Usage database and presents it through a graphical user interface supporting clarity and a single view into issues impacting a deployment.The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides a wide variety of reports intended to address the most common issues impacting capacity, performance, availability, and usage that can be used independently or together to identify and isolate issues occurring in a SharePoint environment. The SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides reports in 5 separate categories:

Integrated search enables rapid insight into issues that have occurred during the lifecycle of a request allowing the IT Professional or Developer to search against the most common criteria including date and time, Correlation Id, and the source user.
Snapshot and export support in the SharePoint Diagnostics Studio provides the ability to take information offline.

Context sensitive help provides guidance on both the purpose and how each report should be used.

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