Key SharePoint Performance Metrics

Marcus EricksonSharePoint Product Manager, Idera Software

What are we going to talk about?

Basics of SharePoint performance for IT pros Basics of performance monitoring Key performance metrics

What we are not going to talk about: Optimizing your SharePoint code Advanced capacity planning End-to-end SharePoint performance tuning

SharePoint performance

Goals Keep users happy and productive Solve problems - If content IS NOT loading fast you

have to diagnose the underlying cause Capacity Planning - If content IS loading fast gather

data for planning and staying ahead of the curve

My goals today: Information targeted at IT Pros Which key counters to watch for every day

administration Provide lists and resources for light reading at home so

you can continue digging deeper

Who am I?

Marcus Erickson SharePoint Product Manager/Developer at Idera

My Background Wrote first program in 1978 – written in Basic a

paper feeding teletype machine with an acoustic coupler running at speeds up to 300 baud▪ Plus we had to code uphill in the snow for 10 miles

Code lots of things over the years:▪ Handheld Operating System, Linker, Virtual Memory

Library, .RTPatch, Voice Recognition Systems, Life Insurance Proposal Systems, etc, etc

But for the last 15 years I have focused on the needs of IT:▪ Mission Critical/NetIQ – Windows administration &

security▪ Idera - Designed and wrote several of Idera’s SQL Server

products including SQL compliance manager, SharePoint diagnostic manager

Currently directing my energies to helping SharePoint admins – this market needs tools

SharePoint to an End User

SharePoint to an Administrator

Image courtesy of SharePoint magazine

Behind the scenes

IT / SP ADMINISTRATOR Manage the hardware Keep SharePoint up and

fast Must figure out when to add

hardware, faster machines etc

Want to know about problems before end users

Blame developers

CONTENT DEVELOPERS

Create pages and other data – write code

Tune/Profile code

Don’t want to care about hardware

Expect IT to be magical and treat the SharePoint farm as a “cloud”

Blame Administrators

Performance Data/Tools

Performance Counters SharePoint Health

Analyzer WMI PowerShell SharePoint object model MOM SCOM Lots of third party tools

Some specific, for one purpose or product; some generic perf monitors

There are 1000’s of performance counters out there from Windows, SharePoint and other apps to help you fine tune Around 100 on just

SharePoint Indexer alone

The key performance indicator

CPU, CPU, CPU This is part of everything▪ Processing page requests▪ SQL Server queries▪ Indexing▪ Processes running on machine▪ Etc.

If the CPU is overloaded all is slow

Causes IT just threw SharePoint on one of their old servers Underpowered machines Too many SharePoint services sharing same machine Too many users hitting same machine

Easiest way to do basic scaling is add more power or split programs or content across servers

CPU on system that is OK

9:00 9:05 9:10 10:00 10:05 10:10 11:00 11:05 11:10 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 6:05 6:10 7:00 8:000

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CPU Usage (%)

• Random spikes are OK• You care about average over time

Long periods of high CPU

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CPU Usage (%)

• Long periods of high CPU signal that you should pay attention• Look for scheduled processes running – building indexes, SQL maintenance , backups – should during off times• Other patterns of activity (everyone logging in at 9am)

High Average CPU

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CPU Usage (%)

• Check user load on machine (IIS connections)• Check if other processes are sucking up CPU• Consistently high CPU means you need higher powered machine or need to split things across machines• Check for heavy pages

OK, so others are important too

SharePoint servers are just Windows based computers

So the basics are the top priority: CPU Disk Memory Network

What should I measure

Metric Frequency

Average % processor time Daily

Disk space – available Daily

Disk space where you store backups

Daily

Memory - Available MBs Memory Daily

Memory - % committed bytes Daily

SQL Data File Size / Log File Size Weekly – capacity planning

Disk – Space used Weekly – capacity planning

IIS connections Weekly – capacity planning

Note: these are overtime; you should set up alerts for problems like disk secs/operation; asp requests queued or rejected

Suggested thresholds (over time)

All is good

Pay Attention

Houston, we have a problem

CPU Usage < 60% 60-90% > 90%

Memory Free % > 50% free

10-50% free

<10% free

Disk Read/Writes/sec 0-15 15-25 25

Disk Time (use only to see use over time)

Avg. Disk sec/Read Avg. Disk sec/Write Avg. Disk sec/Transfer

< 15 ms

> 15 ms > 20 ms

Network bandwidth – bytes total < 40% 41-65% > 65%

Network Latency – output queue length

0 1-2 > 2

Example – monitoring disk space

Which drives to monitor? Everywhere SharePoint lives▪ Drives with SharePoint databases – data and log files▪ Drives with SharePoint log files▪ Disks with other SharePoint content

Metrics Available space MB Available % free Total used SQL data and log file sizes Want to watch current size and growth over time

Watch the basics until there is a problem:

Digging into problems will mean looking beyond one counter:

Sample Questions Was user load high when problem occurred? Was CPU high while pages loaded slowly?▪ Look at other processes to see what’s keeping CPU from

SharePoint?▪ e.g. building indexes during business day; SQL auto growth

Was number of connections high while CPU was high?▪ Your system may not scale for high loads

Was disk activity high while pages were slow?▪ Is SQL auto growing or defragmenting a database?

Levels of investigation

Layer 1 CPU / Memory / Disk/Network

Layer 2 IIS – Connections , Requests Queued/Rejected

SQL Server – Transactions/sec, Write Transactions/Sec

Too much resource contention – segregate data across databases and drives; maybe pages need to be better designed to reduce SQL hits

Layer 3 Individual ASP service Perf Counters – e.g. Search, Indexing, Excel

Performance Monitor

Windows Performance Monitor is a powerful tool In the old days you were limited to watching live or

capturing in a log Now you can also:▪ Basic alerting – start other collections, launch scripts etc▪ Save collections of counters▪ Reports

Don’t use default 1 second interval – it will auto-average over time for you!

Live doesn’t help you diagnose a problem that happened yesterday!

Observer Effect

For most metrics you want to monitor from remote machines For example it takes CPU and Memory to run

perfmon so it will skew your metrics One notable exception is network traffic

since then you are sending performance data across network

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Run-Performance-Monitor-Locally-Remotely.html

Scripting

Also available via scripts so you do what you want with the data▪ PowerShell▪ # List all of the performance counters you can monitor

Get-Counter –listSet * | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Paths

▪ # Get one sample of the processor time Get-Counter '\Processor(*)\% Processor Time' # ▪ Get a sample of the processor time until you press CTRL + C

Get-Counter '\Processor(*)\% Processor Time' –Continuous Available via WMI▪ Monitoring Performance using WMI▪ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974615.aspx

Suggested Readings Follow

General SP Metrics

What deeper SharePoint metrics are available? Of course more and more computer

metrics▪ http://

technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758658.aspx

Metrics for individual SharePoint services

Suggested Computer Metrics Source: Joel Oleson’s Blog

▪ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2007/01/16/good-list-of-performance-counters.aspx

Replace the server name $fe1$ with your front end and $be1$ with the back end server name. 

Front End Performance Counters \\$fe1$\Processor(_Total)\% Processor

Time \\$fe1$\Process(LSASS)\% Processor

Time \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\% Processor

Time \\$fe1$\Process(OWSTIMER)\%

Processor Time \\$fe1$\Memory\Pages/sec \\$fe1$\Memory\Pages/sec \\$fe1$\Memory\Available Bytes \\$fe1$\System\Context Switches/sec

\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Working Set \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Private Bytes \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Page Faults/sec \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Working Set \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Working Set Peak \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Virtual Bytes \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Virtual Bytes Peak \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Private Bytes \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Page File Bytes \\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Page File Bytes Peak \\$fe1$\Process(OWSTIMER)\% Processor

Time \\$be1$\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Disk Write Bytes/sec   Back End (SQL Server) Performance

Counters \\$be1$\\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time \\$be1$\Memory\Pages/sec \\$be1$\System\Context Switches/sec \\$be1$\Process(sqlservr)\% Processor Time \\$be1$\Process(sqlservr)\Working Set \\$be1$\Process(sqlservr)\Private Bytes \\$be1$\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\Batch

Requests/sec \\$be1$\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Current Disk

Queue Length \\$be1$\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Disk Read

Bytes/sec

IIS

IIS is important to SharePoint – should I add WFEs etc.

Some key metrics In addition to per process ones on previous

slides:▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Request Execution Time▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Request Wait Time▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Requests Queued▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Requests Rejected▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Worker Process Restarts▪ \\$fe1$\ASP.NET\Application Restarts

SQL Server Counters

See the load on each SQL Server to decide if you need to split site collections across machines

General User Connections Number of logins/logouts

Database level information Data file size Log file size Active transactions Transactions/sec

Other interesting Locks Deadlocks/sec Lock waits/sec Average wait time Lock wait time Average latch time and more…

SharePoint Services

Examples of services with metrics Search Gatherer Search Gather Projects Search Indexer Catalog Search Archival Plug-In Excel Services Web Front End Excel Calculation Services

Resources

Marcus Erickson Marcus.Erickson@idera.com www.idera.com

General Secrets of SharePoint 10 Steps to Optimize SharePoint Performance by Eric Shupps

▪ http://www.idera.com/Content/Resources.aspx Monitoring and Maintaining SharePoint 2010

▪ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758658.aspx Fast Search 2010 for SharePoint

▪ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff383282.aspx The Perfmon Dilemna

▪ http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/perfmon-dilema-725 Performance monitor – A practical approach

▪ http://ftp.dell.com/app/Perfmon.pdf

PowerShell My first useful PowerShellscript – capturing performance counters

▪ http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/sqlandthelike/archive/2009/11/30/my-first-useful-powershell-script-capturing-performance-counters.aspx

Get the number of SharePoint connections▪ http://geekswithblogs.net/Lance/archive/2009/06/03/get-the-number-of-current-sharepoint-connections.aspx

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Thank you

Marcus EricksonSharePoint Product Manager, Idera Software