SharePoint Performance Monitoring
Posted by Ard-Jan Barnas | Posted in Applications Monitoring, Performance Management, Windows Servers Monitoring | Posted on 13-10-2011
Tags: performance counters, sharepoint
There is no need to remind you that performance monitoring is an important aspect of managing a network environment. As a network administrator you covered all the bases and are on top of monitoring your network not only for outages but for performance bottlenecks as well… right?
Adding SharePoint to your network environment adds new requirements to your performance monitoring needs. One method of monitoring SharePoint servers is by examining the performance counter logs which contains several critical counters that are used when evaluating performance issues. There are a number of primary counters that we’ll look at and they include metrics for CPU, memory, and disk performance.
CPU Metrics
| Counter | Description |
| System\Processor Queue Length\(N\A) | Logs the number of items waiting to be processed by the CPU. Values higher than 2 indicates the need to add more or faster processors. |
| Processor\% Processor Time\_Total | Records the current CPU utilization. This log helps determine the need for additional processor capacity. |
| Processor\Interrupts\Sec | Records the number of times processing is stopped to handle a hardware request for disk or memory I/O. Values higher than 1000 may indicate a hardware issue. |
Memory Metrics
| Counter | Description |
| Memory\Pages/sec\(N/A) | Monitors the data written to or read from memory. Values higher than 200 indicates the need to increase RAM. |
| Memory\Pages Faults/sec\(N/A) | Records the number of times that data was not found in memory. |
| Memory\Available Mbyers\(N/A) | Monitors the amount of memory available to the system. Values below 10% of total physical memory indicate the need for more RAM. |
| Memory\Pool Nonpaged Bytes\(N/A) | Records the amount of data that cannot be paged on the disk. |
Disk Metrics
| Counter | Description |
| PhysicalDisk\% Disk Time\DriveLetter | Logs the amount of time for which disk is active during the last monitoring period. Values higher than 80% indicate that there may be a problem with the hard drive controller or insufficient memory. |
| PhysicalDisk\Current Disk Queue Length\DriveLetter |
Logs the number of the items waiting to be written to or read from the disk. Values higher than 2 indicate a problem with the disk subsystem. RAID 5 or RAID 10 should be implemented to improve performance. |
These are some of the core metrics that you can configure in Monitis to monitor your SharePoint server(s) performance. In our next article about SharePoint we’ll discuss specific performance counters for SharePoint and creating a custom monitor for them.
