Performance Monitoring of Virtualized SharePoint Application

Microsoft SharePoint deployment has become critical in organizations, serving as a collaboration and document sharing tool. SharePoint has become so essential in enterprises that it’s also widely being deployed on virtual environments. Virtualized or not, we look to have the service up and running at all times. This is perfectly fine as long as there are no faults and issues causing application downtime or slowdowns.

So, what is there in a SharePoint architecture that could go wrong, especially when it’s virtualized, and what do you need to monitor?

The Application Infrastructure

• The SharePoint application itself running on your physical server or a virtual machine (VM)
• The operating system where SharePoint is installed
• The server that’s running SharePoint, and its underlying hardware components
• Other system processes and services running that may bog down the performance of SharePoint (e.g., SQL, active directory, etc.)

The Virtualized Infrastructure

• Performance of the VM that runs the SharePoint application
• Resource contention issues between VMs – CPU, memory and storage utilization
• Datastore IOPS to see if storage read/write operations between the VM and the datastore is going well, and if other VMs sharing the datastore are slowing down the IOPS
• Performance of the host and the host cluster

Each of these is a critical entity to monitor and can contribute to application and service failure, and certainly more IT management headaches. To monitor this complex framework, you need the depth and visibility into the performance metrics from the virtualized application to the virtual infrastructure.

SolarWinds Virtualized Application Performance Pack (VAPP) combines the power of performance monitoring across your application and virtual environment, and gives you flexibility to view critical performance statistics on a single pane of glass. 

• Part of VAPP, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) will gather SharePoint performance metrics, and alert information in one place. You can drill down to gain visibility into additional detailed performance data. You can also customize user-friendly dashboards to meet specific SharePoint monitoring needs.

SAM has out-of-the-box component monitors that allow you to monitor queued SharePoint requests, request wait time, cache API, worker process and the SharePoint service metrics such as search, text indexing, trace output, sending notifications and performing scheduled tasks.

• Alongside your application health information, you can import VM performance metrics into a SAM dashboard from SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (part of VAPP) to provide detailed and granular VM, host, cluster and datastore statistics that may impact the performance of the virtualized SharePoint application.

For example, you can see:

• • Storage I/O on the VM and/or datastore for the application nodes
  • Storage capacity and usage for the applications on the VMs
  • CPU usage (% Used, MHz, CPU Ready) on the VM
  • Memory (% Used, Ballooning, Swapping) on the VM

And more…

Some Tips for Creating Custom Widget & Importing to SAM

This Virtualization Manager Dashboard Integration video walks you through the process of embedding a Virtualization Manager dashboard widget in the SAM interface.

A similar process can be used to embed a Virtualization Manager widget into any other location that can display HTML.  A summary of the steps is also provided below.

Export from Virtualization Manager:

• Create a widget on Virtualization Manager dashboard with VM/host/cluster/datastore statistics and charts
• Copy the widget’s HTML code to be imported into SAM

Import into SAM:

SolarWinds SAM gives you the functionality to add custom HTML pages with its dashboard on any page/view. 

• Select the node/application/component details page, where you want to place the widget
• Customize the page, add a Custom HTML resource wherever you desire on the page
• Paste the HTML code from Virtualization Manager into this custom HTML section to get populate the widget and performance data in real time

Download Virtualized Application Performance Pack today, and monitor your virtualized SharePoint application and its virtual infrastructure. Stay ahead of performance bottlenecks!