Companies around the world rely on SharePoint to run their businesses. Its services are critical to business workflows, and therefore SharePoint performance monitoring plays a vital role in ensuring the system’s readiness at all times.
In a perfect world, we would create each of our SharePoint solutions from the ground up while adhering to all Microsoft best practices. But in the real world, different admins and developers help build these solutions over a long time. Additionally, Office 365 and SharePoint keep evolving, so the best practices from last year might not be today’s recommended way of doing things.
The continuous evolution of SharePoint can force you to manage extensive, fragmented deployments without documentation to help you determine the source of any performance issues. The best way to overcome this dilemma is to perform your SharePoint health check to address this issue and prevent unpleasant surprises in the future.
Understanding SharePoint Health Check
SharePoint performance monitoring is essential for organisations to get the best out of their systems. The SharePoint Health Check supports businesses in conducting in-depth SharePoint security and performance audits. The approach evaluates the overall condition of a SharePoint deployment and its specific components, discovering defects that impact the system’s security, stability, and performance.
The approach includes the following:
- Assessment of the SharePoint farm
- Code review and evaluation of custom applications
- Analysis of load-time
- SharePoint security audit
- Analysis and assessment of content
- UX assessment
- Analysis of database response time
A) When to use SharePoint Health Check?
Organisations often experience several routine problems with their SharePoint deployments. You should conduct SharePoint performance monitoring using Health Check in case you face any of the following issues.
Reduced performance
Your SharePoint platform could become slow due to the growing number of sites, customised solutions, and content, which ultimately lowers user productivity. Neologix can help you with SharePoint performance monitoring and assist you in locating the root of the problem.
Security concerns
Misconfigured deployments, improper permission settings, and unpatched vulnerabilities are just a few issues that could jeopardise the security of your system. We can thoroughly examines your SharePoint solution from several security aspects as part of a SharePoint security audit to find both visible and hidden security problems and to quickly fix them to prevent a significant impact on your deployment.
Low user adoption
Performance and security issues can result in lower adoption rates and subsequent problems. Our team assesses your current solution and elaborates on the practical strategies to fine-tune or reconfigure it to fit your corporate goals and users’ wants and preferences in close collaboration with end users, business, and technical representatives.
Increasing support costs
Finally, ongoing SharePoint problems force businesses to continually spend more money on maintaining the reliability and stability of their solutions. By approaching the issues head-on, you increase the effectiveness of the entire solution and lower the cost of troubleshooting by your system administrators or third-party service providers.
B) What is included in the SharePoint Health Check?
1. Assessment of SharePoint farm
We undertake a SharePoint farm assessment to identify performance issues brought on by the deployment’s faulty setup or poor architecture. The assessment includes:
- Capacity assessment
- Assessment of infrastructure thresholds and constraints
- Farm configuration review
- SQL server assessment
- Proxy tier evaluation
- Analysis of SharePoint logs
- Assessment of authentication and networking
- Service accounts assessment
- Evaluation of search configuration
- Assessment of backup and recovery
2. Code review and assessment of custom applications
We offer a thorough evaluation of the overall condition of the custom applications included in your SharePoint solution.
- Examining the logs of custom applications for some time.
- Examining every exception that custom applications generate.
- Reviewing custom code to find extra complexity, specific statement errors, and code inconsistencies.
At Neologix, we concentrate our efforts on significant concerns during the code review stage, such as potential security flaws, application crashes, and other logical and design mistakes in the code. Our SharePoint experts also assess the following non-standard elements that frequently impact SharePoint performance:
- Event receivers
- Delegate controls
- Master page functionality
- HTTP modules/HTTP handlers/services
- Custom authentication providers
- Custom web parts
- Custom pages
- Custom actions
- Timer Jobs
3. Analysis of load-time
Our team examines your SharePoint solution as part of SharePoint performance monitoring to identify potential load concerns.
We examine and track the load times of random SharePoint pages. We also check the custom styles and designs applied to SharePoint, which can impact how quickly essential components like the home page or highly personalised sites load.
Additionally, we examine how quickly the solution loads in other web browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Edge, and others.
4. SharePoint security audit
To ensure that your company’s data is secure, we assist you in evaluating the overall security of your SharePoint solution and its component pieces.
- Examining SharePoint security certificates
- Conducting SharePoint permissions audit
- Examining the security configuration of local servers
- Affirming antivirus configuration
- Examining authentication methods
- Monitoring security updates
5. Analysis and assessment of content
We define content that may impact the system’s performance using PowerShell scripts.
- Number of subsites
- Items count
- Fields count
- Resource throttling settings
Large SharePoint lists with an excessive number of items can significantly reduce performance. A SharePoint Health Check helps determine that. Under the Microsoft Minimum Recommended Rules, we offer advice on carefully restructuring large document libraries to achieve the best performance.
6. UX Assessment
SharePoint performance monitoring and SharePoint Health Check are incomplete without User Experience assessment. Our SharePoint specialists examine your solution from a usability perspective to offer the most optimal solution.
The analysis involves a thorough journey across the SharePoint solution based on a user’s job (an accountant, a marketing professional, etc.) to access the solution’s logic and usability. We will also examine the impact of the current SharePoint design on the adoption rates among end users. The evaluation also involves a separate investigation into the mobile versions of your SharePoint solution or your own custom SharePoint mobile apps to examine their functionality, responsiveness, and performance.
7. Database response time analysis
Comprehensive SharePoint performance monitoring can assist you in identifying the source of issues, resolving them quickly, and improving database performance.
For instance, poor SQL query execution times can negatively impact database performance. With a SharePoint health check, you can find the time taken to execute SQL queries Regular SharePoint health checks will help you pinpoint the cause of slowdowns.
Conclusion
Microsoft’s SharePoint is a beneficial tool for streamlining workflows and boosting corporate productivity. To get the most out of your SharePoint solution, you need to monitor and manage the performance of its servers and applications.
Our team of experts will help audit your SharePoint solution for performance issues and vulnerabilities to ensure that it becomes the core of innovation in your organisation and can redefine how you do business.
Contact us if you have questions regarding SharePoint performance monitoring or the SharePoint Health Check. We will be more than happy to assist you.
