Monitoring SharePoint is Required
SharePoint is huge. While it has its’ moments of frustration, most every business depends on it in one form – SharePoint Server, SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2019 – or another. The Microsoft 365 web-based collaborative application has use cases for businesses of all sizes. Most organizations depend on content and sharing to function. When this is the case, the application must be monitored because when it’s slow, not responding, or inaccessible your end-users won’t be able to get their work done.
In the November 2020 Gartner report, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant for the fourth year in a row.
How Popular is SharePoint?
- It is reported that in 2020, more than 85% of all Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint worldwide.
- In 2020, SharePoint usage grew to more than 200 million monthly active users or approximately half of all Microsoft 365 users.
- SharePoint Online grew to 81% of the usage of SharePoint in total while the on-premises version dropped to 19% of total usage.
How to Monitor SharePoint Online Performance
Watch this video to see how easy it is to get started monitoring Office 365 SharePoint Online. Set up your first Exoprise synthetic sensor in minutes. Monitor SharePoint performance 24*7 and track when the server application is down or having issues.
Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive Application Monitoring
CloudReady sensors provide complete coverage for monitoring Office 365. Monitor SharePoint end-to-end including critical interactions with Single Sign-On (SSO) like Azure AD, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), and cloud-based SSO vendors like Okta, OneLogin, Ping, and more.
CloudReady SharePoint monitoring tool enables:
- Proactive monitoring as opposed to passive monitoring. Passive monitoring or Real User Monitoring (RUM) doesn’t inform you of an issue until a user experiences the problem first. Slow pages, outages and overloaded web servers can go undetected without Active Monitoring like CloudReady which tells you about a problem BEFORE your end-users complain.
- Cross-server diagnostics are critical. Instrumenting and correlating metrics that span multiple servers, domains and DMZ’s is extremely difficult. It makes detecting a slow server, route or slower CDN nearly impossible. CloudReady sensors capture the end-to-end user experience interacting with multiple servers across the different boundaries for complete visibility.
- Simple Setup & Maintenance – No scripting required, Exoprise maintains the actions that operate against the app pages, securely and in a universal manner for consistency and crowd-sourcing network benchmarks.
- Crowd-Sourced Benchmarking – Only Exoprise CloudReady enables you to benchmark your installation against other customers (anonymously and in aggregate). Know instantly whether your SharePoint environment is slower than others. Correlate metrics across the Internet to understand where and when there is an outage to simplify SharePoint administration.
SharePoint Monitoring – Logon Metrics, Federated or Managed, Proxy Timings
With SharePoint, often used for corporate intranets and mission-critical team collaboration, access and control is protected by cloud-based or on-premises Single Sign-On (SSO). Measuring and monitoring performance is critical to access control for the collaboration app.
- Login Time – For all sensors, Logon Time is captured as part of the overall login procedure.
- Initial Page Time – This value represents the initial page loading time including all redirects through front-end authorization.
- Proxy Connect Time – CloudReady Sensors installed behind proxy servers, either on-premise proxy servers or cloud-based like ZScaler, measure the proxy connection time for advanced warnings about potential outages and slow downs.
- Managed Logon Time – Managed logon performance versus Federated logon performance depending on sensor account configuration. Your Single Sign-On infrastructure is continuously monitored for uptime and performance.
- Federated Logon Time – Federated logon performance is often difficult to measure because of the many redirections and cross-server telemetry. CloudReady helps you determine the bottlenecks of your SSO clusters and providers.
SharePoint Logon Benchmarks Including Federated (SSO) or Managed Logon
SharePoint Online Request Duration, IIS Latency, Health Scores
SharePoint Latency, Online Health Scores, and Request Timing
As part of each synthetic sensor run, SharePoint and IIS specific counters are captured, recorded and aggregated. Benchmark and compare your app performance, outages and errors against global and regional CloudReady crowd data. This assists in proactive outage detection and capacity planning.
- Request Duration – An average for all of the app requests during the sensor run as reported by the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server.
- IIS Latency– An average for all of the latency measurements between the IIS server and the SharePoint server for all of the requests for this Sensor Run. This value can indicate an under-performing SharePoint Online installation.
- Health Scores– The health score reveals the health of the underlying application servers. 0 is healthy and 10 is unhealthy. The score is calculated using many parameters such as memory usage, concurrent requests and processor utilization.
SharePoint Upload, Search and Download Collection Metrics
CloudReady SharePoint Sensor emulate users uploading and downloading files for network and server performance testing. Collections and document library can be specified in addition to testing search performance.
- Upload Time – This value is the duration, in milliseconds, of how long it takes to upload a 420k (average size of an office document) file to the server collection.
- Upload Search Time – Time spent finding the uploaded file in the library and measuring index and search performance
- Download Time – How long it takes to download the uploaded file from SharePoint measuring latency, bandwidth and access times.
SharePoint Upload and SharePoint Search Timing
SharePoint Download Performance Compared to Other CloudReady Customers
SharePoint DOM and Initial Layout Timings
SharePoint Page Performance & Loading Statistics
Page performance for the SharePoint pages are captured with each run which assists in measuring WebPart, DOM, page part, and Javascript performance from an end-users perspective. Tracked and correlated over time, these metrics can pinpoint slow dependent servers and additions that slow down delivery.
- DOM Loading Time – The time between the initial request and the point when the response has been parsed and the DOM/page is loaded.
- Initial Page Layout Time – The time between the initial request and the point when the response has been parsed and displayed, but before any DOM manipulations. Typically, pages that have dynamic content will require further page manipulation before the page is fully responsive and ready to be interacted with.
SharePoint Monitoring and Network Visibility
Each connection to SharePoint and the underlying IIS servers is recorded for low-level timings such as Connect, SSL Negotiate and Time-to-First-Byte. Captured metrics aide in troubleshooting poor network performance, proxy servers and connectivity problems. The metrics are aggregated over 90 days for long-term network trends.
- Connect Time – Time it takes to connect to the server for retrieving content and uploading files
- SSL Negotiate – Time it takes to handshake and perform the Secure Sockets Layer negotiation for the connection. This is the most network intensive of a connection to the SharePoint servers and will be affected by a slower (higher latency) network.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) – TTFB is a critical measure of how overloaded IIS and SharePoint servers may be in processing and serving up content from Office 365.
- DNS Lookup – Host name resolution is measured for each part of the SharePoint page that is built up off of content from different servers and CDN networks.
Low-level Network Intelligence for SharePoint
Cross Server Time-to-First-Byte Timings
Proactive Notifications
Find out about issues before your users do
Easy, Secure Deployment
Easily and securely deployed in any environment, any location
Crowd-sourced Analytics
Reduce SharePoint MTTR with the power of the crowd
Installation & Setup Is a Breeze
Deploys In Minutes
Each CloudReady sensor has its own set of requirements and configuration. Using the Exoprise Management Client, customers configure and validate before deployment to a single or multiple sites. Our guided setup wizards guarantee an easy and successful deployment for end-to-end SharePoint monitoring.
- Download the Exoprise Management Client
- Deploy a Private Site
- Check prerequisites
- Configure the SharePoint sensor credentials, landing page, and libraries to access
- Deploy to Private or Public CloudReady Sites
- Be up and running with inside and outside monitoring in minutes