SharePoint 2010 Health Checking and Monitoring

You might be fully aware that health checking and monitoring are among the areas where SharePoint 2010 has improved a lot from it predecessor MOSS 2007.

I am just summarising here my google search on SP 2010 monitoring, with the links that I have found useful

Thinking about get report output generated through powershell?

"You cannot use Windows PowerShell to view health report data.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663478.aspx

"

nice article that summaries monitoring using OOTB SP 2010 tools http://www.packtpub.com/article/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-administration-monitoring-and-reporting

So in the end what you can do through powershell

- Configure the health analyser jobs

- Run the jobs - http://www.sharepointusecases.com/index.php/2010/10/run-all-sharepoint-2010-health-rules-now/

And then ask the user to grab the reports from the central admin

This is what SharePoint provides out of the box

What SCOM provides

The SharePoint 2010 Products Management Pack (MP) is built to detect, diagnose, and alert on software and hardware incidents discovered by agents installed on SharePoint machines.

· Health monitoring of SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps

· Monitors Events and Services and alerts when service outages are detected

· Monitors Performance and warns users when SharePoint performance is at risk

· Forwards users to up-to-date TechNet knowledge articles

A nice video from Brian farnhill, very nice http://www.screencast.com/users/BrianFarnhill/folders/Default/media/3f9f1d6e-4678-4666-88e6-25765f2a7b64

You need more?

One more thing that can be done (looks beyond the scope of engagement but for future reference) is creating custom health check rules.

http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Custom-Health-Rule-for-SharePoint-2010-that-checks-for-Debug-build-assemblies.aspx

Probably you won’t create the rules, but prefer to wait till they appear on codeplex or as a separate product

Manual Review of SP 2010 Deployment

And lastly youmight need to do a manual review against the sp2010 planning best practices, to analyse if they have planned the servers/services right (logically to meet the business needs)

Hope it would help

Microsoft MIX10: Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 full video demos

A nice 2 hours long video with demos and Scott Gu!
Though I am scrathcing my head, Silverlight 4 RC is out and Blend 4 is on its way where we have just got our hands on Silverlight 3 and blend 3, either Microsoft didn't plan it well or they are too agressive, too agile.

http://www.product-reviews.net/2010/03/16/microsoft-mix10-windows-phone-7-and-silverlight-4-video-demos-in-full/

"
"For all of you who missed Microsoft’s keynote speeches at their MIX10 event in Las Vegas this week, it is good news – as we have the entire video to show you, detailing key features for Windows Phone 7, as well as Silverlight 4.""

SharePoint 2010 | Office 2010- Live Launch event on May 12

From Microsoft Official Sharepoint Site

Watch Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announce the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 11 a.m. EST. The live keynote focuses on the next wave of productivity that delivers:

• End user productivity across the PC, phone and browser
• IT choice and flexibility
• A platform for developers to build innovative solutions

Join the virtual launch event with Microsoft executives, product developers, partners and customers to:

• Find out how peers and partners are already seeing benefits to their business by leveraging the next wave of productivity.
• Submit your questions through live Q&A.
• Participate via blogs, tweets, social media networks, commenting, and more.

View on-demand breakout sessions showing how Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 meet the unique challenges people and businesses are faced with today, and provide the solutions they need for tomorrow.

Save the Date: Microsoft Office + SahrePoint Launch Event

Add to your outlook

Writing Software Requirements Specifications | A Technical Communication Community

I like to share this very nice article on writing requirement specifications, reading that was like a taking a step back and think again

Writing Software Requirements Specifications A Technical Communication Community: "Writing Software Requirements Specifications
by Donn Le Vie, Jr.
Here's the scenario: You're finishing up your latest HTML Help project...no more late nights or weekends...back to a 'normal' 50-hour work week. That's when the development team lead strolls into your office and says she just got your manager's okay for you to help the development team 'put together the functional requirements specification template for the next major project.'............."

Creating virtual image of your PC using disk2vhd and SunVirtualBox

Why do we need to create an image?

When we take the backups we normally do it by copying the data to some external storage. However, we know very well that it is not only data that is critical to us. Our complete PC, with OS and applications installed is the working environment that we need to carry on our work in addition to data. There is an easy way to create the virtual backup of your machine so that you can use that image on any machine and get your complete working environment back in no time. Also if you need to get another developer on the project you can create a standard dev machine image.

What do we need  ?

1. Microsoft Disk2vhd http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

2. Sun VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ (Recommended, required for 64 bit machines)

OR Microsoft Virtual PC http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/ (doesn’t support 64 bit windows)

3. External hard disk (with free space equivalent to you machines used disk space)

Steps:

1. Create Virtual image using Disk2Vhd. Either do it from command prompt or through UI. Remember to ensure that your external drive is formatted on NTFS otherwise it will not create more than 4GB file. For my 67 GB image it took around 2 hours to create the file on external drive. Also if you gave got other virtual images on your PC’s drive then better backup them manually from your machine hard disk to external hard disk in order to keep the back up image size small. I wonder if we can get an option in Disk2Vhd to select the files/folders that we want to be excluded from the image.

Command Line Usage

Disk2vhd includes command-line options that enable you to script the creation of VHDs.

Specif the volumes you want included in a snapshot by drive letter (e.g. c:) or use "*" to include all volumes.

Usage: diskvhd <[drive: [drive:]...]|[*]> <vhdfile>
Example: disk2vhd * c:\vhd\snapshot.vhd

User Interface

 

2. Once the image is taken then you can run Sun VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine. Select the right parameters (like the operating system of your original machine) and allocate enough RAM (at least 50% of the original machine). Now you just need to start the machine. With Sun VirtualBox you do not need to worry about creating loopback connections as we do in MS VirtualPC. As soon as your virtual machine comesup it will be able to start using the network connection of the host to access internet.

Here is the image of my own machine running on the original machine.

 

Bing it or Bung it? Google it.

Yes it is beta but…..

This is in continuation of my previous post. Although Bing it is still in Beta but it really surprises me how could Microsoft release such a half cooked product. As I understand beta version means a software that has been tested internally, found stable,  worked as required and released as beta so that if some something missed from the testing team could be captured by early users.

the test,

1. Search mvc.net 1.0 in Bing and Google, search results look ok (better than Live Search), see my previous post on Google and live search comparison

2. Frequently when I search technical stuff I go straight to images to find an architectural document as ‘ a picture is worth thousand words’. So I did the same in Bing and Google and my jaw dropped – () .

3. I searched for ‘Mvc.net 1.0’. Bing came with only three images, not relevant to search, while Google came with 1470 very relevant images. Clicked on Video & news, not result found in Bing, Google came with loads of videos as well as relevant news items.

4. To make it easy , modified the search to just ‘mvc.net’ , images came in greater number but more than 90% irrelevant while Google came with about 90% relevant!

Sorry Bing,

For search engine war, Microsoft can’t win with their old strategy of ‘Early to market with bugs’ . They could win with products like Office, windows and SharePoint etc where there is not that stiff competition but taking on Google Search is something different. So I still go for ‘Google it’

KUMO (BING), Can it take on Google?

the latest,

Microsoft is expected to show the first preview of its new search engine BING code named Kumo next week.

From very brief details available online it looks that it is going to fix a basic shortcoming (when compared with google) i.e. search results categorization. Also at the moment google shows up the results with images and videos for your search while Live Search doesn't .


Following is a brief summary from eweek.com Microsoft to Unveil Kumo, a New Search Engine

"Kumo will organize search results in an efficient way, grouping them into sub-categories, and represents an upgrade from Microsoft’s Live Search. For example, if you do a search of "Audi S8," it will feed back results categorized under "Audi S8 Parts," "Used Audi S8," "Top images for Audi S8," and "Top video for Audi S8." In theory, this will result in faster searches, sparing the community from having to sort on their own through pages of ungrouped hyperlinks. Microsoft has been testing the search engine internally for months, according to several different published reports. "


After reading the news I asked myself 'Why do I like Google?' The first immediate answer was its interface was so simple and came out with that simplicity when the other search engines home pages were loaded with tons of crap (news, weather, sports, entertainment etc).

how google search differs from live search?

I spotted few differences when I ran a search for 'asp.net mvc'. There is one serious issue with live search that could be spotted very quickly. Both Google and Live search came with similar results but the description of the search results were totally different. Where google was showing the text that was related to the search context, Live search was showing the site description instead. Of course I do not need to see the description of the site as whole, I am more interested to see if there is something promising enough for me in the site making me click and open the web page. This alone is enough for me in preferring google over Microsoft Live search, lets wait and see if they have fixed this in KUMO or not.

see yourself,








Further more, from aesthetic point of view, leaving space on left side as blank in Live search results page doesn't look good to eyes.