Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

252 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Monitoring Performance Counters
Most large enterprises have some tools in place for monitoring hardware, software,
and applications. Many of these products provide a central interface for monitoring
and sending alerts to system administrators to notify them of hardware component
failures and loads exceeding thresholds.
Microsoft products such as Microsoft SQL Server 2000, IIS 6.0, and SharePoint
Portal Server 2003 include SNMP Management Information Bases (MIBs), which
make this monitoring possible. An MIB is a set of objects that represent information
about a device. The MIBs store the performance counter results, which are readable
through Windows Server 2003 System Monitor (known as Performance Monitor in
Microsoft Windows 2000).
Certain critical performance counters provide early indicators of loads
approaching thresholds or irregular load behavior. This chapter provides an extensive
list of available performance counters.
More Info For more information about how you can log performance
counters, see Windows Server 2003 Help and Support Center and search
for “monitoring server performance.” You can access the Windows Server
2003 Help and Support Center by pressing the F1 key.
Microsoft Operations Manager
Microsoft Operations Manager delivers enterprise-class operations management by
providing comprehensive event management, proactive monitoring and alerting,
reporting, and trend analysis. The Application Management Pack, which is the product
support knowledge base included in Microsoft Operations Manager, helps you
reduce the day-to-day support costs associated with running applications and services
in a Windows-based environment.
The Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 management pack module
monitors events placed in the Application event log. The module highlights events
that indicate possible service outages or configuration problems so that you can
quickly take corrective or preventative actions. For example, the management pack
module alerts you of the following critical conditions:
■ Data backup or restore failures
■ Core services, such as search, alert notifications, and administration, failures
■ Content source update failures
■ Search propagation of one or more content indexes failures
■ Audience compilation or profile import failures