SharePoint Monitoring, Rabid Rabbits, and the End-User Perspective

You’d think SharePoint was a rabid rabbit, from the way companies talk about it “proliferating” and “running rampant” and “uncontrolled.”

Its user-friendliness is also its curse, which means SharePoint admins, a slightly more rare breed of the genus IT pro, have a huge volume of sites to monitor and manage.

Enter GSX Monitor & Analyzer for SharePoint. The solution was created to enable IT departments to proactively manage messaging and collaboration environments and delegate troubleshooting to free up SharePoint admins’ time.

Agentless, it works on a virtual machine or a work station. Out of the box it begins to monitor—you define your thresholds on critical parameters and get set to be alerted.

The most interesting thing is that it offers a picture of SharePoint’s health from the end-user perspective, displaying service levels related to the user experience. It aligns IT with users, letting you see what users are getting, and its stats on performance and availability can help with maintaining SLAs.

It lets admins do real-time monitoring of the content database to keep an eye on the numbers of sites and their size, and offers performance stats to give IT pros a sense of what the user is using. Updates are often in response to customer requests and the company is always adding new user simulations. January 2012 will see a SharePoint update, and March will see an Exchange one.

It also provides an integrated view of the entire collaboration environment beyond SharePoint, including Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And it also integrates with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

It supports SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2007, Exchange 2010, and Exchange 2007. Licensing is per server, per user, and volume discounts are available. To learn more see the GSX website.