SharePoint Comic

There are many products out there for heavy monitoring of a SharePoint / Server environment.  Alerts, notifications, different levels of health checks, etc..  I recently examined Idera Pointcheck, their free SharePoint performance monitoring tool.  It’s light weight and has just enough features for the typical monitoring that I need, and probably a lot of companies need.  I wouldn’t recommend this for an Enterprise environment, but there are certainly smaller companies out there utilizing SharePoint (WSS anyone?) that could benefit from a ‘lite’ monitoring application.  I don’t need anything complex, just let me know when my SharePoint WFE is down.  :)  The best part, its free.

What it will monitor:

• Server
• CPU Usage
• Memory Pages Per Second
• Memory Usage
• Used vs Total Physical Memory
• IIS
• App requests per second
• App requests queued and rejected
• SharePoint
• Current vs Maximum Connections
• Site Response Time

It will also do some discovery for you as well, such as SharePoint Version, IIS version and info, and server information (such as OS and processors),

About: (from Idera website)
Idera SharePoint performance monitor is a free tool that enables easy monitoring of critical performance counters for SharePoint, IIS and Windows Operating Systems.

• Monitors SharePoint performance in real-time
• Easy to read graphical console
• Sends email alerts when issues arise
• Runs in your system tray

Setting it up:

You need to install Pointcheck on a desktop / server that you can leave on so that you can get notifications while you aren’t in the office obviously.  It doesn’t put anything on the SharePoint server itself, so no worries there.  But, be sure to use an account that actually has access to SharePoint (and the server itself).

After downloading and installing the application (which is straight forward), you will be prompted to configure it upon first use.

Click on the ‘Get started by…” link

Enter your SharePoint URL, and your Host server (name of server hosting the SharePoint app).  Click on the the Test Connection button, and it will test everything for you.

In this below screen (click to view larger image) you can see all of the things that it will monitor for you.  Pretty slick if you ask me considering its free. 

Monitoring is great and all, but its not going to help much if I don’t get alerts when I’m not starting at the UI.  Before you can get the alerts, you need to configure the Email settings.

Click on Options > Configure Email Settings

On the Configure Email Settings window, enter in your SMTP server info and send yourself a test email to make sure it’s configured properly.

If you got the test email, groovy.  Now its time to set up an alert.  In the Pointcheck application, select the option for Monitoring and Alerting Options.

As you can see in the image (click for a larger version), you can set up some nice alerts based upon different reasons and specific intervals.

So there you have it.  Idera’s Pointcheck, free tool for monitoring your SharePoint site(s) and alerting functionality.  Now the next time your SharePoint goes down, you’ll know about it and hopefully have enough time to get it back up before your phone starts to ring off the hook with angry co-workers, or worse yet… your boss.