Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 10: Performance Monitoring in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 251
Maintaining a Problem History
You should design the monitoring solution to provide an accurate history of events
and problems. For example, if the network management and monitoring system logs
events in a standard format, the IIS-related entries can be periodically extracted, compiled,
and archived in a central location for periodic review later. These extracted logs
provide critical trend data that can be used to perform the following tasks:
■ Identify recurring problems.
■ Support capacity planning.
■ Provide summary information about reliability and availability.
You should consider maintaining an issue log to track problems and solutions
for future reference. If a problem recurs, future users can see how it was previously
resolved.
Maintaining a Written Plan
You need a written plan that provides timely, accurate, consistent, and reusable
responses for every failure, event, or problem. Executing a consistent plan for
addressing recurring events helps avoid wasting time, resources, and money.
Using Effective Notification Techniques
Actively capturing real-time event information is useful only if the responsible parties
are notified to implement the action plan. Event notification accomplishes the
following four important goals:
■ It notifies the parties responsible for fixing the problem.
■ It notifies the parties responsible for administration of the system.
■ It notifies the parties affected by the event. Users do not need to know the
details of the problem, but they need to know if there is an interruption, or
anticipated interruption, and when the problem will be resolved.
■ It notifies each party to take appropriate action.
After you have captured an event and have notified the responsible people,
you should do the following:
■ Minimize the impact of the problem.
■ Perform a root-cause analysis to determine the exact nature of the problem.
■ Correct the problem.
■ Create a plan for providing a long-term solution and a reusable action plan
should the event recur.