1. Key SharePoint Performance Metrics
Marcus Erickson
SharePoint Product Manager, Idera Software

2. 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
Quick cover what we will talk about

3. 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
Going to focus on basics so you can build on this

4. Who am I? Marcus Erickson My Background
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

5. SharePoint to an End User
Waiting for page to load
Waiting
SharePoint sucks – its so slow – wrong!!

6. SharePoint to an Administrator
Lots of moving parts
Need to architect; need to plan
Need to react
It’s a real system
Image courtesy of SharePoint magazine

7. Behind the scenes Manage the hardware Keep SharePoint up and fast
IT / SP Administrator
Content Developers
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
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
IT – why cant we get real developers?
Content developers – why do we get the old hand-me-down hardware?

8. 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
Luckily its easy for admins – there lots of good data for performance analysis

9. 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
Yes, there are 1000s of metrics available
One is king
Yes this is common sense but many people jump straight to complex stuff and forget about the basics. If you are lucky enough to have a big budget and can have everything you want then this may not be a problem – but you cant win the Indy 500 in a Model-T
Adding servers to a SharePoint farm is not like trying to decrease the time it takes to have a baby by adding more women – adding more CPU power can work

10. CPU on system that is OK Random spikes are OK
You care about average over time

11. Long periods of high CPU
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)

12. High Average CPU 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

13. OK, so others are important too
SharePoint servers are just Windows based computers
So the basics are the top priority:
CPU
Disk
Memory
Network
Yes they are just servers – but they do a lot of stuff
IIS, Indexing, Searches, Crawlers, Excel Calculation, SQL Server, Page Rendering etc
SharePoint’s job is to server up content – documents, html pages etc

14. What should I measure Metric Frequency Average % processor time Daily
Disk space – available
Disk space where you store backups
Memory - Available MBs Memory
Memory - % committed bytes
SQL Data File Size / Log File Size
Weekly – capacity planning
Disk – Space used
IIS connections
Note: these are overtime; you should set up alerts for problems like disk secs/operation; asp requests queued or rejected

15. 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
1-2
> 2
These need to be averages over a long period of time – like a day or week – anything can spike
Just watch CPU when you wiggle mouse

16. 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

17. 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?

18. 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

19. 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!
Not your father’s perfmon

20. 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

21. 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

22. Suggested Readings Follow

23. General SP Metrics What deeper SharePoint metrics are available?
Of course more and more computer metrics
Metrics for individual SharePoint services

24. Suggested Computer Metrics
Source: Joel Oleson’s Blog
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$\Memory\Available Bytes
\\$fe1$\System\Context Switches/sec
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Working Set
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Private Bytes
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Page Faults/sec
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Working Set Peak
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Virtual Bytes
\\$fe1$\Process(w3wp)\Virtual Bytes Peak
\\$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

25. 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

26. 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…

27. 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

28. Resources Marcus Erickson General PowerShell Marcus.Erickson@idera.com
General
Secrets of SharePoint
10 Steps to Optimize SharePoint Performance by Eric Shupps
Monitoring and Maintaining SharePoint 2010
Fast Search 2010 for SharePoint
The Perfmon Dilemna
Performance monitor – A practical approach
PowerShell
My first useful PowerShellscript – capturing performance counters
Get the number of SharePoint connections

29. Idera Solutions for SharePoint
Performance and availability monitoring for SharePoint
11 Tools to simplify SharePoint management
Enterprise-class backup and recovery for SharePoint sites
Architect, organize and migrate SharePoint content
Today’s webcast is sponsored by Idera Software, providing tools for all your SharePoint needs, including SharePoint diagnostic manager and SharePoint migration manager.
Idera provides a full suite of powerful and easy-to-use tools to simplify the management of Microsoft SharePoint environments including tools for performance monitoring, administration, backup and recovery and migration. Try a free 14-day trial of any Idera product by visiting
Fast, effective SharePoint security administration
Power tools for SharePoint administrators and developers 29

30. Thank you
Marcus Erickson
SharePoint Product Manager, Idera Software