Best Tips for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring and Health Check

Microsoft 365 SharePoint is a web-based platform that can be used by organizations to manage collaboration effectively.

SharePoint also provides file sharing, content exchange, task management, shared calendars security controls, and workflow.

SharePoint can be used by small and large organizations to manage group collaboration and collaborative project management. By configuring it correctly, you can use SharePoint more effectively.

Correct infrastructure configuration and monitoring also ensure the performance and scalability of your infrastructure.

Moreover, a health check reveals the present and potential risks in your SharePoint configuration.

Best Practices for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring

Microsoft 365 SharePoint comes in various installation modes, notably on-premises, online, and hybrid. The SharePoint infrastructure setup of each of the above modes can be involved and necessitates proper monitoring to avoid potential risks.

The proper monitoring and health checking of infrastructure ensures the security of your environment.

It helps you to unmask the potential risks that can be faced by users, developers, or teams over time. Some best practices for proper SharePoint infrastructure monitoring include:

Monitor Health Reports

Regular health checks ensure the prevention of potential harm to the environment due to organic sprawl. Along with the health check, it is vital to analyze the health check reports to be aware of the attributes of the environment.

The health check reports of SharePoint infrastructure reveal various metrics like webpage loading time, library sizing, database sizing and capacity, overall usage, and response time.

Once you are aware of the metric values, you can take action to manage and improve the corresponding metrics.

Implement SharePoint Auditing

User log files can sometimes play a vital role when you are facing regular issues with your website. SharePoint comes with some auditing features that help you view the evolving sizing and performance of the environment.

It enables you to determine which team or user is associated with the effects the sites, lists, and libraries have caused. SharePoint Auditing allows you to filter and analyze the environment to manage such emerging issues.

Monitor SQL Server for Disk Space

Due to the limitation of disk space in on-premises environments, storage management is crucial when working with the SharePoint infrastructure.

SharePoint should not be viewed simply as a database and should be used with caution for large file storage. Monitoring disk space can help avoid performance and scalability issues.

Site Storage Should Be Monitored

The proper structure of the stored data provides many vital advantages and prevents misinterpreting the data. The data for SharePoint content is stored in a SQL database.

It is vital to monitor site collection storage for disk space management and structuring of data. You can view the content stored on your site by following this two-step process:

• Visit the site settings in your root site collection.
• Click storage metrics in site collection administration.

Maintain the Structure of the Smart Site Collection

System performance is highly affected by the structure of your libraries. The storage metrics enable you to view the size of your libraries but don’t display the number of items that are contained in a library.

You can store more than 30 million items in a single library, but for best practice, it is advisable to have at most 5000 items inside a library.

Note there are methods to carefully scale beyond the 5000, with limitations. You can view the number of items in your library by using the site content option on your website.

It is advisable to re-evaluate your structure if it contains libraries with more than 5000 items to reduce performance issues and view errors.

Establish Permissions for Governance

If users are not assigned the proper permissions, it causes great confusion in collaborative SharePoint projects.

It is essential to ensure that publicly intended data is easily accessible to all users, while private data be accessible only to authorised users.

Permission management is vital for the smooth workflow and security of projects. The permissions assigned to a site can be viewed by visiting Site Permissions in Site Settings.

Keep an Eye on External User Access

One commonly used feature in SharePoint infrastructure is that you can assign permissions to your site to an external user.

If the permission management is not done properly, the external user may get access to sensitive data from your organization.

Moreover, the data may be visible to the user for longer durations than required.

When to Go for a SharePoint Health Check

Poor Performance

Running a health check of your SharePoint infrastructure is vital if your site’s performance is being degraded.

The poor performance of your SharePoint site can be due to many reasons, like content structure, library sizing, view configuration, custom solutions, page design, fragmented permissions, and a large number of SharePoint sites along with web parts.

The health check of your SharePoint websites can reveal hidden bugs degrading the website’s performance.

Security Issues

Hidden security issues, vulnerabilities, misconfigured deployments, and mismanagement of permissions can cause serious security threats to the data of the site.

The health check reveals the hidden security threats on your site and enables you to develop a more secure web application.

Poor User Adoption

Users would resist adopting a site if it were changing continuously or poorly structured.

Moreover, teams would be frustrated if security issues and the performance of the site were hampering their users.

High Support Costs

Regular health checks enable you to find issues in the SharePoint site at an early stage. It saves organizations money and effort because bugs at a later stage cost a lot of money.

What Is Included in the SharePoint Health Check?

• SharePoint farm assessment
• Custom code review
• The SharePoint security audit
• Assessment and analysis of content
• Customized application evaluation
• Load time analysis
• User experience assessment

Additional Read:
7 Critical Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes Businesses Make

Conclusion

SharePoint infrastructure monitoring plays a vital role in maintaining the security and control flow of your projects.

The outsourced health checks prevent larger security breaches, rework costs, and user interface problems.

Monitoring SQL disk space, site storage, SharePoint auditing, and monitoring health reports can reveal potential risks to your project, site, and environment.

Frequent health checks prevent poor performance, security issues, high support costs, and user adoption problems at their early stages and prevent them from growing larger.