Exam Prep: Optimization and Monitoring

The Exam for SharePoint 2016, is broken down into various categories, in these blog posts we will cover the following:

This post will focus on the first topic of Optimization and Monitoring. You will also need to study the following areas:

Some key links outside of the topic for this post can be found below: 

Troubleshoot a SharePoint environment:

Now that you have built a new SharePoint 2016 farm, upgraded a previous version of SharePoint and configured all the Productivity Services, now you need to look after it. Making sure the SharePoint Farm is working like it should do, with no errors is the ultimate goal for all of us that work with SharePoint. However, knowing how to diagnose errors and resolve them takes a lot more care and attention and can often take some time. Now not only is resolving issues important, but the ability to optimize the server components to perform better can often be more important and will actually reduce any issues you may have faced. 

Having worked with SharePoint for some time now, one of the things that is useful is knowing some of the settings to check right before launching the site, as such the following few tables can be helpful for this:

IIS Web Logging

Core settings to better identify issues caused within SharePoint that get logged in the IIS logs.

Website Caching and Compression

Application Pool Settings

SharePoint relies on application pools for running its web processes, as such making sure the settings are correct is important. In actual fact, no changes should be needed, unless someone has strayed away from the default setup and installation.

Usage and Monitoring

Setting the right logging and monitoring setup when running the site will be the difference between getting good logs and bad logs. The ideal is to no just simply enable verbose logging, but to be strategic on what is selected knowing that during debugging you will enable more as needed.

These options will allow you to set some basic configuration that will help in setting the logging options as well as increasing the performance of the overall solution.

A big part of optimization is not even SharePoint, it is the database level that can often have the greatest performance increase when optimized. To learn more read the following TechNet articles:

Best practices for SQL Server in a SharePoint Server 2016 farm

All in all, studying for the Exam will take time, and require you to know a lot about SharePoint 2016 and how to setup, configure and manage.