Syskit Insights 3.0 has arrived. This version will provide SharePoint admins and company managers with health overview of your environment. Receive simple report on your email regularly and browse it in minutes to spot trends and see the state of your environment.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Product version: 3.0.0 Build number: 853 Release date: Dec 19, 2018

Click here to download the new release.

Features

• Health Overview report: Receive a daily or weekly pdf report about the state of your environments . Schedule the report to arrive either daily or weekly. For detailed information, see this article.

• Refresh Farm Configuration. When adding a new server to a farm, you don’t need to add it manually. Simply click the Refresh Farm Configuration button on the Farms tab and all new servers will be added.

Improvements

• We have improved the way we detect and handle SQL clusters, and in general all high availability technologies. In addition, SQL named instances are now fully supported.

• When sending an Event Alert email, we now attach an excel file containing all the relevant logs.

• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

This is a minor release that comes with critical bug fixes and brings some quality of life improvements.

Product version: 3.2.0 Build number: 929 Release date: Dec 10, 2019

Click here to download the new release.

Improvements

• Fixed a critical bug where Intra Farm Latency was not collected.

• Added additional logging for easier troubleshooting of various issues.

• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

This release is all about the Page Performance! From now on, you can monitor End-User Experience and proactively track if your SharePoint pages are slow for your users. Syskit Insights now supports SharePoint on-premises, SharePoint Online, and hybrid SharePoint environments. You can easily monitor simple but essential information like page's uptime, load time, or more complex, like every loaded element of a page to find the cause of the slowdown.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Product version: 2.0.0 Build number: 802 Release date: Oct 30, 2018

Click here to download the new release.

Features

• The main new feature in this release is Page Performance! It allows you to monitor SharePoint pages, and gain valuable insights into their performance. Receive alerts and spot critical metrics for each monitored page. You can also export SharePoint page performance metrics and drill down to find trends and improve the experience for your users. Oh, SharePoint Online pages are also supported! :)

• Full support for SharePoint 2019

Improvements

• The dashboard has been redesigned and improved! The left-hand side gives an overview of all your farms and the servers in them, while the right-hand side shows the content, with an overview of your logs, alerts, performance counters, SharePoint service status, farm latency, and page performance.

• The Syskit Insights web application can now be started with a desktop shortcut.

• The SharePoint search service is now checked only on a SP Search Server. The User Profile Service is disabled by default.

• It has come to our attention that latency alerts were being sent way too often. So, the default period for latency alerts has been increased from 30 minutes to 12 hours.

• We have added a Event type (SQL, ULS, Event Log) column to the event log export.

• There are numerous performance improvements.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue when the deleted server remained visible on the Latency tab

• Fixed an issue with detecting multiple agents during an upgrade.

• Fixed an issue when trying to use the “none” grouping of servers on the Performance tab.

• Fixed an issue with the collection of ULS logs on SharePoint 2019 farms.

Discontinued Features

• With the introduction of the Page Performance feature, the “Site Collections are unavailable” alert has become obsolete. See this article for more information on how to monitor your pages with the new Page Performance feature.

• The Express license has been discontinued. Instead, you can use the free tool Syskit Insights Lite.

Your feedback and suggestions will help us build better SharePoint admin tools, so please feel free to contact us and send us your feedback and suggestions.

This is a minor release and it brings some quality of life improvements.

Product version: 3.1.0 Build number: 905 Release date: Jan 10, 2019

Click here to download the new release.

Improvements

• Syskit Insights will constantly monitor your servers and send you real-time email alerts when one or more of your servers go offline. You will know at what time exactly your servers became unavailable.

• You can now allow web app access to individual users or security groups. You don’t have to add individual users anymore, but simply allow access to groups such as IT department or SharePoint Admins, and if someone new joins the group they will automatically have app access.

• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

Syskit Insights is a powerful tool for monitoring and troubleshooting your SharePoint environment. It combines all the features necessary for keeping you farms healthy and even alerts you in real-time if something goes wrong

Features:

• Insights gathers ULS, SQL and Windows Event Logs across all servers and all farms

• Easily search, filter and export ULS, SQL and Windows Event Logs

• Receive email alerts regarding to the problem that you want to proactively track

• Monitor the most relevant performance counters based on server's role

• Receive email alerts if one of the performance counters reaches warning or critical value

Syskit Insights is perfect solutions for SharePoint admins who want to keep a close watch on their environment but don't want to spend hours and hours on end to achieve it.

Download free trial and give it a try! https://www.syskit.com/products/insights/

This is a service release and it brings only a couple of changes.

Product version: 1.1.1 Build number: 514 Release date: Aug 28, 2018

Click here to download the new release.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issues with Manage Alerts form. Before, Syskit Insights would not save any alert changes.

• Fixed an issue with Event Viewer refiners. The refiners are now showing the correct count of found issues, taking into account the query text, time and the log type.

Syskit Insights 1.1.0 delivers a fresh set of new features created to make your monitoring tasks a lot easier. Keep on scrolling and see what's new!

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Product version: 1.1.0 Build number: 484 Release date: Aug 2, 2018

Click here to download the new release.

Features

• Intra-farm latency! We now check intra-farm latency. In 10-minute intervals, we ping every server in the farm. According to Microsoft’s hardware requirements, 99.9% of pings must be under 1 ms. If they’re not, we will notify you. For detailed information about this feature, check out our help article.

• We heard your requests, and now the entire Syskit Insights application is accessible via browser as a web application, making it easier than ever to share reports and event log searches with your colleagues. For more information, click here.

• Event Viewer export: Previously, you could only export 1,000 events to Excel. You can now specify the number of exportable events.

Improvements

• In the performance counters screen, it is now possible to disable the instance (hard drive) you do not wish to track. Furthermore, some hard drives (such as Witness drives) are hidden by default.

• Alongside SharePoint Timer Service, you can now also track SharePoint Search Service and SharePoint User Profile Service. If any of these services is stopped, we will notify you.

• We’ve added Syskit Insights Maintenance service. Now, the Agent and the newly added Maintenance Service will start each other if one of them fails or is unexpectedly stopped.

• In the Manage Alerts form – Performance Counters section, you will now immediately see a green dot if alerting for the corresponding counter is enabled.

• It is now possible to check the status of more than just one SharePoint site. Also, the site check URL must begin with htttp:// or https://.

• We’ve added alerts and latency sections to the Home Dashboard.

Bug Fixes

• Forwarded events had a delay in collection; thus, the collection did not work properly. The issue is now fixed and the events can be accessed normally in the Event Viewer.

• Fixed an issue with ULS log collection if the ULS log path was not set to default.

• Fixed a bug which caused the Alerts form to behave in an unexpected manner.

• Numerous smaller improvements and UI tweaks.

Performance monitoring is always hot topic when you are dealing with SharePoint. People may have different points of view of what exactly SharePoint performance monitoring is, but they will have one common thought: being proactive and knowing your environment's state at any time of day is always the way to go.

Syskit Insights is a SharePoint-dedicated farm performance and troubleshooting tool, created to make your life easier. Let's see what this version of the tool is bringing to the table.

Try Syskit Insights Free

Product version: 1.0.0 Build number: 345 Release date: Mar 7, 2018

Farms Screen – Adding servers and farms with ease

The tool offers three possibilities – adding a single farm, scanning the entire environment to collect all accessible farms, or importing SharePoint servers directly from SPDocKit. Regardless of the method you choose, you won't need to install the tool on any other environment that you wish to monitor – Syskit Insights gathers all the information remotely.

• Add Farm – simply type in one SharePoint server from the farm you wish to monitor, and Syskit Insights will detect all other servers automatically.

• Scan – run Syskit Insights wizard to crawl the entire environment and present all accessible farms you might want to monitor. If you don't want to crawl the entire domain, choose a specific Organization Unit in which Syskit Insights will look for the farms.

• Import from SPDocKit – if you already have SPDocKit installed in your environment, you can connect it with Syskit Insights and all the servers you are monitoring with SPDocKit will be added and monitored automatically.

Read more about Farms screen possibilities and management options.

Home Dashboard – Global health overview of your environment

Home dashboard gives you the global state of your farms and servers.

The Performance part will alert you to the top 5 critical servers when it comes to disk usage, CPU utilization, and memory consumption. Also, you will get straightforward information how many servers are critical or in the warning phases. You can drill down to see more details about each component.

The other part of the Home screen will show you how many Event Viewer entries were detected per farm, sorted by source, server, and level. The “Entries by day” chart can help you detect trends on which days are the most critical when it comes to number of issues with regards to ULS, event log, or SQL entries.

Read more about Home Dashboard.

Event Viewer – The ultimate ally for searching through ULS, Windows event, and SQL logs

Syskit Insights collects all available ULS, Windows event, and SQL logs from all added servers. These entries are presented in one central console which allows you to search by server, correlation ID, any other keyword, or even the level of events. You can also change the period for which you want to search the logs through.

With Syskit Insights, you no longer have to manually search for important ULS or SQL entries from multiple servers when trying to troubleshoot your environment. This single point of interaction will present you with all the important information gathered from your servers.

If you wish to proactively track a certain issue or keyword, you can create an alert to receive notifications at a specified email address or just monitor them from the Syskit Insights Alerts tab.

Read more about Event Viewer functionality.

Performance Dashboards – One screen to rule all performance counters

The Performance Dashboard gives you a centralized overview of your farms’ health. Servers that are healthy will be colored green, servers in the warning phase will be yellow, and the most problematic ones will be red.

One glance at this dashboard and you will see which servers you should be dealing with as soon as possible. The state of a servers is calculated based on the thresholds for each of the 30-plus SharePoint-dedicated performance counters. Drill down by each server or farm to explore in more detail every performance counter and track which component is the reason for SharePoint performance downgrading.

Syskit Insights can save performance data up to 30 days, so you can use historical data to track each server's baseline during optimal performance.

Create performance alerts to actively monitor all your servers and receive email notifications when something goes wrong. Acting in time will prevent your SharePoint from becoming slow or even going down.

Read more about Performance functionality.

Alerts and Notifications – See what has been going on while you weren't looking

To keep up with potential bottlenecks and problems detected in your environment, we created the Alerts tab. Here you can track down all performance alerts, Event Viewer entries you marked as potentially interesting and problematic, and the results of SharePoint status inspections. SharePoint status alerts can help you detect if your Central Administration and most important site collection on the farm are inaccessible, or if the SharePoint Timer service has stopped working.

Use the Manage Alerts button to add new alerts, change thresholds for critical and warning states, or modify current alert settings.

Read more about Alerts.

Settings – Modify Syskit Insights configuration to completely match your needs

For complete control of Syskit Insights, check out the Settings section. Here you can configure the email settings needed to send email notifications, modify which logs will be collected, and other data collection options.

Read more about available configurable Settings.

Tell us what you think!

Your feedback and suggestions will help us build better SharePoint admin tools, so please feel free to contact us and send us your feedback and suggestions.

Try Syskit Insights Free

To run Syskit Insights and to retrieve all the data (event logs and performance counters) you want to document, Syskit Insights service account needs to have proper privileges. Here is the list of required privileges:

• Local administrator on all the machines you want to monitor. Both SharePoint and SQL server.

  • We are using Remote WMI to access performance metrics on SQL servers. As per this Microsoft article local administrator privileges on a remote server are required to successfully access the performance data using Remote WMI approach.

  • Syskit Insights requires local administrator privileges to access logs (ULS, Windows Event Log, SQL Log) on remote machines as well. It is not possible to access those locations remotely without local administrators privileges (Windows constraint).

• Minimum of db_datareader on a SharePoint's Config database.

• On a SQL server - public server role.

• The account running the Syskit Insights Configuration Wizard must have dbcreator role on the SQL Server where the Syskit Insights database will be created.

Syskit Insights relies on Active Directory to reach the names/addresses of the computer. So, the Service Account needs to have permission to read from AD.

After that it uses WMI to collect all the data. If you have a firewall between the machine hosting the application and the servers that are being monitored, you will need the following info.

The firewall inbound rules on Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019 are (this is inside the windows firewall):

• File and printer sharing (NB-Session-In)

• Network Discovery (NB-Name-In)

• Network Discovery (NB-Datagram-In)

• COM+ Remote Administration (DCOM-In)

In case you have the third party firewall the ports are:

• RPC TCP 135

• NetBIOS Datagram Service UDP 138

• NetBIOS Name Resolution UDP 137

• NetBIOS Session Service TCP 139

Only for performance counters:

• TCP Any, the special rule in Windows Firewall [performance logs and alerts (DCOM-IN)]

• RPC TCP 135 [performance logs and alerts (TCP-IN)]

Only for Page Performance:

• Syskit Insights service account must have at least Read permisison level on the page that Syskit Insights is monitoring.

Software

• Microsoft Windows 7 (with Service Pack 1), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 or later are supported (64-bit only)

• Windows Server editions: Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2019, all editions

  • Please note that we do not recommend installing the application on a server which is part of a SharePoint farm.

  • In case of Windows Server 2008 R2 you will need the latest update for Windows Management Framework.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 or higher

Hardware

• CPU – any Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10 capable CPU with at least two cores

• Memory – 200 MB RAM while idle. Maximum RAM consumption depends on the workload and the number of monitored servers.

• Disk – 250MB of available hard disk space

• Index – we recommend minimum of 200GB disk space required to store the index containing all the data (ULS, SQL logs and Windows Event logs). However, this largely depends on your infrastructure and how big your farm/s are. It is recommended to change the index location to a secondary drive.

• 1366×768 or higher resolution video card

Database System

In order to run the Syskit Insights, you need a database. The Syskit Insights supports SQL Server databases only. SQL 2008 or better is supported.

User must have proper privileges to successfully run the application.

Syskit Insights provides continuous load of the SharePoint ULS, Windows Event logs and SQL logs in real-time. The Syskit Insights Agent will gather selected events and store them on index location on your disk. Syskit Insights presents a centralized place for you to explore, detect and prevent possible issues appearing on your SharePoint farm. Performance data is also collected and is stored in the Syskit Insights database.

Use Syskit Insights to keep multiple farms under control and find problems more easily.

1. Application.

2. Unpack and run SysKitInsightsSetup.exe. The wizard will guide you through the installation steps, click Next > to proceed.

3. Click I Accept the terms of the license agreement to accept the license and then click Next > to proceed.

4. Choose the installation folder e.g. C:\Program Files\SysKit\Insights. Click Next > to proceed.

5. Select the location where to create application shortcuts and the preferred availability option (Anyone or Only me). Click Next > to proceed.

6. The installation wizard will unpack your files and you will be able to run the application from: Start > All Programs > Syskit Insights.

And that is it. The application is installed. Now we need to setup the Syskit Agent. This is how:

After the installation is done, Syskit Insights - Configuration Wizard will automatically start. Alternatively, you can start it manually by running it from the installation folder (default is C:\Program Files\SysKit\Insights\Service\SysKit.Insights.ConfigurationWizard.exe)

1. Database - here you need to choose whether you want to create a new database or use an existing one. If this is your first time setting up the application choose 'Create new database'.

2. Database Configuration - On the Database Configuration wizard page specify the SQL Server, Database Name and authentication. It is possible to overwrite the existing database under the same name.

   • If you are using the default instance type "servername", or "servername.yourdomain.loc"

   • If you are using a named instance type "servername\instancename", or "servername.yourdomain.loc\instancename"

   • If your SQL Server is on a non-standard port (different from 1433), type "severname,port" or "servername\instance,port". (FQDN formats are also supported)

     After providing the information, click the Test Connection button to ensure that the settings are correct.

3. On the Service Settings type the service account details. The service account needs to have the to be able to collect all the data from the desired servers.

4. Insights Configuration

   • Index Location – you need to ensure that the provided service account has write access to the index location directory. The directory for the index must be empty or contain an existing index. It is recommended not to place the index on the system drive. Be careful if you plan to use the system drive for index location, as it can be quickly filled up.

   • Port To Use - this is the port that the Syskit Insight Agent will use to communicate with the Syskit Insights application. By default, port 7890 is set, but you can change it to suit your needs.

   • Max Index Size – by default we set this value to 200GB with a maximum of 1TB. Feel free to change it to suit your needs and hardware capabilities.

     If the service determines that the index exceeds the maximum index size, it will stop the data collection. Note that the actual size of the index can vary because of index reorganization and can require up to 3 times the amount of disk space specified here.

     • Please note! - The requirement of up to 3x the amount of disk space is more of a precaution against very rare cases where indexing wasn't running for any given reason. In most cases even during the intense index reorganization it would temporarily use up to 20% of the current index size.

5. click Next to complete the Configuration Wizard and apply the changes.

Online Activation

In order to activate your copy of the Syskit Insights online, please proceed with the following steps:

1. Navigate to the About dialog by clicking on the icon in the left lower corner, and then click the Activate button.

2. Fill in all the required fields. Your company name and the product key.

   The product key is a combination of letters and numbers. In order to claim your activation key, please log in to our . There you will be able to track your orders and download the latest application versions you are entitled to. Once you have entered the product key it will be validated against our activation server. If your key is valid, a green check mark will appear next to it.

3. Click the Activate button to start the activation process. Activation takes a couple of seconds and is a one time process.

Offline Activation

Customers that have no internet access on their machines will need to activate Syskit Insights manually. In order to activate your copy of the Syskit Insights manually, please proceed with the following steps:

1. Navigate to the About dialog by clicking on the icon in the left lower corner, and then click the Activate button.

2. In the Activate Syskit Insights dialog, click on the Offline Activation link and a new activation dialog will appear. Follow these steps:

   • Navigate to the and enter the following requirements: 1. Product key - can be located on our . 2. Company name 3. Server Name - is NETBIOS name (network server name) of your server. To check your server name go to Control Panel > System > Computer name (tab). Computer name is listed next to the full computer name label. Trailing dot(.) is not a part of your server name.

   • Click the Generate license file! button and download the license file (.lic).

3. Return to the Syskit Insights application and import the license file by clicking the Browse... button, locating your license file and opening it.

4. Click the Activate button to start the activation process. Activation takes a couple of seconds and is a one time process..

At any time you can login to our and navigate to the list of your licensed products. If you do not have the activation information, please .

Syskit is asking you to activate your copy of the Syskit Insights so we may verify if your product was purchased legally. During the activation process, your personal data and your product key will not be sent to Syskit.

Activation is based on a number of factors that are being calculated during the activation processes. The activation process identifies only the computer, but it does not include the information about your software or data that resides on your computer, or any other information about your computer model or environment.

If you wish to perform your activation offline, please follow these instructions.

Is the trial version limited in any kind?

The trial is the latest released application version containing all available application features.

What are the trial limitations?

There are none limitations. Except for the 30 day time limit.

What happens during product activation?

Product activation is a simple process that occurs during registration of the purchased product. The product key is entered and then authenticated with the Syskit product activation server in order to activate the product. The entire activation process is quick and easy, and the majority of users will have to perform product activation only once.

Who will be required to activate their products?

Anyone who purchases Syskit Insights will be required to activate the product. If the product is ordered online from the Syskit website, the product activation code will be sent via email.

How soon must I activate my product?

It is recommended you activate your product within the 30 days of the trial period. After the period expires, the application will stop working until it is activated.

What happens if I do not activate my product?

If you do not activate your product within the 30-day trial period, it will stop working until you activate it.

If I do not have a product activation code to activate my software, how can I get a product activation code?

How do I activate my product?

What does Syskit do with the information sent during the product activation process?

We use the information only to verify that your product is used within the scope allowed by the Syskit End-User License Agreement (EULA). The information is stored in a database and used only for product activation data. If you register your product, none of the activation information will ever be linked to your personal customer information.

Why does Syskit require their customers to activate the software?

Product activation is a simple way to reduce and deter unauthorized use and casual copying of Syskit products with a minimal effect on our loyal customers.

Will the activation process ever send data to Syskit after I activate my product?

No. Activation is a secure and anonymous one-time process. After activation is complete, the license manager runs alongside the product for the sole purpose of verifying the integrity of the license file and the validity of the product license. The activation technology in the product does not send any additional information to Syskit.

How long does the product activation take to complete?

Product activation is a one-time process that is typically completed immediately after installation of the software. Activation typically takes 2-5 seconds to complete.

When is product reactivation required?

Product reactivation is required only under exceptional circumstances – if, for example, you upgrade or replace your machine, or if the activation process detects that the license has been tampered with.

What if I have more than one server/machine? Does the new license allow me to use the software on multiple machines?

One Syskit Insights license can be activated on any number of machines. In fact that is required if you wish to use more than one agent to monitor your servers.

Where can I find the EULA for Syskit Insights?

I forgot my password — can you tell me how to reset it?

1. Enter the email address associated with your account

2. Click on Reset Password.

3. Instructions on how to reset your password will be emailed to you. Please note: sometimes these notifications can end up in your junk folder, so please check there if you don’t see our email within a few minutes. To avoid these situations, please add our email address to your Safe Senders List.

Let's get started

After successfully activating the application, or starting the trial, you will be welcomed by the Farms screen.

Farms

• First thing you need to do is add farm/s. Until you do so, some parts of the application will be disabled. Afterwards, on the same Farms tab, you can see on overview of farms and servers you added, as well as the License Server Limit.

In this article we provided detailed overview of farms and servers that are being tracked. Also, it explains different options on how to add a new farm or a new server into an existing farm.

After all that is done you can start observing the collected data.

Home

The Syskit Insights home page gives you an overview of a general performance regarding the health of your farms and servers, as well as events, alerts, service status or latency. The dashboard view depends on whether you have selected a farm or a server. From the dashboard, you can drill down to any other tab.

• If you have multiple farms you will be able to select a farm from which you want to see the general performance. You can also see the general performance of each server within the chosen farm.

For more details, please use the home tab.

Event Viewer

Event Viewer tab provides you with a centralized place to search for ULS, Windows Event and SQL events all over your farm. Syskit Insights uses a layout similar to a search engine to display the results, and is just that - a powerful search engine.

• To start using the Event Viewer first select a farm. If you only have one - an automatic search will be triggered.

• If you would like to be alerted for events that match a specific query, you can do so in Alert Me option.

• Also, we provided more detailed information on writing the search query. See this article.

For more details on how to use the Event Viewer, click here.

Performance

The Syskit Insights Agent relies on performance counters to monitor the server performance. The Syskit Insights calculates the following server status: Healthy, Warning, Critical, Offline or not accessible.

• The individual metrics are calculated based on their average value during the last 15 minutes. By using this approach the Syskit Insights can ignore short spikes in activity.

• The farms performance overview dashboard shows all farms currently monitored by Syskit Insights Agent. It shows status for each server in those farms.

For detailed information on the entire Performance section see this article.

Alerts

The Syskit Insights Alerts page gives you an overview of your alerts. There are five categories: Performance Counters, Events, SharePoint Status, Latency and Page Performance. Alerts are useful because you can be warned about any unwanted performance drops or if a log appeared that matches the query that you wanted to be notified about.

• When you add a new farm, it will take a couple of minutes for the servers to initialize and the application to start displaying data.

• Performance counters have predefined thresholds that can be modified to best suit your needs.

For detailed information on managing your Alerts see this article.

Latency

The Syskit Insights latency screen gives you a detailed overview of all the ping intervals made.

Latency indicates the delay in communication between servers, and is important as a hardware requirement. High latency usually indicates a bigger underlying problem, and should be investigated.

In this article we provide a detailed information about the Latency tab.

Page Performance

Syskit Insights monitors the performance of SharePoint pages by periodically gathering page performance data. Here, you can add and manage pages that you wish to monitor.

• You can monitor both SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online sites/pages.

• Page ping events are monitored throughout the day.

• Various parameters can be monitored, such as page availability, page response time or SharePoint specific header metrics — or even whether a huge image of someone’s cat (for example) is slowing down the page opening time.

In this article we provide a detailed information about the Page Performance tab.

Settings

In order to fully utilize Syskit Insights' features you need to enable the email notifications. Also, while on the settings page, note the Farms and Agents sections bellow the General Email Settings.

• You can navigate to the Farms section and tweak the collection configuration to best suit your needs.

• If you wish to change data collection interval, data retention or index size go to Agents section.

For detailed information on settings customization see this article.

If you are monitoring multiple SharePoint farms, they will all appear here. The metrics shown will change depending on which farm or server is selected.

Farm dashboard

• Server Status – Information about how many servers are in the critical, warning, healthy or offline state.

• Logs – Total number of events collected per day. If you click on the date or on the column representing the events, the graph will change into a Logs by Server view and you will see the total number of events per server collected for the selected day.

  The Total Index Size and Number of Events in the index are shown at the top of the graph. Also, you can see the Last Update Time of the index.

  The index size can fluctuate because of how index reorganization works. Also, since the data retention job deletes data day by day, sudden drops in this metric are possible.

• Alerts – An overview of alerts received for the entire farm. For a detailed view, click the View All Alerts button at the bottom of the tile.

• CPU Utilization – The top three servers with the highest processor usage based on the last 15 minutes of data collected.

• Disk Space Usage – The top three disks by disk space used across all servers, based on the last collected value.

• SharePoint Services Status – Whether SharePoint Timer, Search, or User Profile Services are running on the selected farm.

• Intra-farm Latency – Shows the servers (if any) with high latency. At the bottom, the + X Critical Servers button will take you to the latency tab, which has detailed information about latency.

• Page Response – Shows whether the pages you are monitoring are offline or critical.

Server dashboard

To see the server dashboard, click on any server in the navigation.

• Logs – The graph will show the number of events by type per selected server on a given day. You can see the total number of event log, SQL and ULS events.

• Alerts – The latest alerts for the selected server.

• Server Performance – A list of performance counters currently in a critical or warning state.

• Services Status – Whether there is a stopped service on the selected server.

• Intra-farm Latency – Latency status for the selected server.

Syskit Insights collects performance data by default. This behaviour can be modified in the settings. Additionally user can change the performance data collection interval. The default value is 60 seconds.

The Syskit Insights Agent relies on performance counters to monitor the server performance. The Syskit Insights calculates the following server status:

• Healthy – colored green

• Warning – colored yellow

• Critical – colored red

• Offline or not accessible – colored grey

The server is in critical state if at least one metric collected is in critical state, in warning state if at least one metric is in warning state and none of the other metrics are in critical state, and the server is in healthy state if there are no metrics in warning or critical state.

The individual metrics are calculated based on their average value during the last 15 minutes. By using this approach the Syskit Insights can ignore short spikes in activity.

You can filter servers using these statuses. While on Performance tab click on the Filter icon, located right of the search bar. Clicking on the desired status will filter servers. You can even combine more then one status. Such as Warning and Critical.

When the user is located on Performance tab of Syskit Insights a help link will be show. Following that link user can see all the details about the metrics Syskit Insights Agent collects. The description of each metric, warning and error thresholds are listed (where applicable).

Farms Performance Overview Dashboard

The farms performance overview dashboard shows all farms currently monitored by Syskit Insights Agent. It shows status for each server in those farms. Additionally it displays main performance metrics (CPU usage, RAM usage, network usage and disk usage) for each server in a concise manner. Users can choose between three different views: Compact, Tiles, Grid. All views display the same data just in different format. The dashboards are continuously updated as the new data is collected.

There are four option by which you can group the servers. They are:

• Farm - grouping will be done by the farm. With Critical servers first, then Warning, Healthy, and the Offline ones.

• Type - the servers will be divided in two groups - SharePoint and SQL Servers.

• Status - Critical servers first, then the ones with Warning status, then Healthy and the Offline ones.

• None - there will be no special grouping, all servers are together. Status is still shown in the usual manner. Critical -> Warning -> Healthy -> Offline.

Sometimes the server will be shown in warning or critical state when none of the four general metrics are in warning or critical state. This indicates that some of the metrics which are not shown on the main dashboard are in critical or warning state.

By clicking on farm name users can navigate to detailed farm overview dashboard and by clicking on specific server the users can navigate to server overview dashboard.

Detailed Farm Overview Dashboard

The detailed farm overview dashboard shows more in-depth data about each server in the farm but is limited to just a single farm. Users can view last fifteen minutes of CPU usage, current RAM usage and status of each disk partition on specific server. This dashboard is also continuously updated as the new data is collected. By clicking on specific server users can navigate to Server Overview Dashboard.

Server Overview Dashboard

The server overview dashboard shows all metrics that are collected for each server. The metrics are separated in different categories. The server role in the SharePoint farm determines which categories are assigned to each server. The categories are assigned to a server following these rules:

• General and Disk categories – these categories are assigned to all servers, and the metrics in those categories are collected for every server in farm. The General category shows CPU, RAM, network and disk usages while the Disk category shows detailed information about disks performance

• IIS/ASP.NET category – this category is assigned only to a SharePoint Frontend server. These metrics show the usage of IIS on each Frontend server.

• .NET category – this category is assigned to all non-SQL SharePoint servers. The metrics in this category show how the processes on each non-SQL SharePoint server are using .NET framework capabilities.

• SQL category – this category is assigned to all SQL servers in SharePoint farms. Each server in Always-On cluster is included as well. These metrics show the SQL server performance.

• SQL (Named) category – this category is shown only if you are using a named instance - counters collected are specifically for that instance of SQL server.

• Search category - this templates helps you track a number of 'search' relevant counters on servers in SharePoint farm. Diagnose various problems and performance issues with ease.

If the metric is in a warning or critical state the notification next to the metric name will indicate a problem using a red color to indicate a critical state, or a yellow to indicate a warning. The status of each metric is calculated based on the average in the last fifteen minutes. The status of metrics for which the warning or critical thresholds are not defined will not be calculated.

Hovering over any chart will show a maximize button in the top right corner. Click it to expand the chart over the entire screen. You can toggle Show thresholds button to show or hide the threshold lines (both critical and warning). When the threshold lines are active the chart will scale to fit both the threshold lines and the values. When the threshold lines are turned off, the chart will be rescaled to optimally include only the collected chart values. If the selected chart/counter has more than one instance, on the top right of the chart (next to the show thresholds button) there will be a dropdown where you can change the instance you wish to observe.

The users can change the time range to view older data. By default Syskit Insights shows data collected during the last sixty minutes. The metric status is still calculated based on the last 15 minutes.

This article gives a basic overview of how to use Syskit Insights's Event Viewer.

Use Syskit Insights Event Viewer to search for events

1. Select the Event Viewer tab in the left navigation.

2. Select the farm for which you wish to perform the search.

   • Selecting a farm is only available if multiple farms are used with the same Syskit Insights database.

3. Select the time range in which to search for events.

   • Please limit the range as much as possible for optimal performance.

   • First search will automatically be done with the "Last 10 Minutes" time interval.

4. Enter your search query. Click here for more details on writing a search query.

5. An empty query (all events within the specified time range) is also supported, but use sparingly, or on small time ranges. Just click search or press the enter key.

Viewing results

By default, Syskit Insights uses a layout similar to a search engine to display the results. This layout can be changed to a more compact grid layout by using the dropdown button just below the search button. The results can also be exported to an Excel file.

Refining your query

1. You can refine your query by:

   • Type of event (ULS, Event Log, SQL)

   • Additional refiners such as Server and Level are positioned to the left and will modify the query text.

   • Clicking on terms in the search results will also modify the query text.

     • for the compact grid layout expand the search result for this functionality to be available.

2. When satisfied with the constructed query, press the search button again.

Alerts

You have created a very useful query and would like to be notified when an event that satisfied this query appears? No problem, just create an alert by clicking the alert button on the search results page. Click here for more details.

There are five categories:

Performance Counters

Performance Counters tab will automatically populate as soon as the application concludes the status's of the performance counters. That usually happens within 15 minutes of starting the application. The columns we provide here are: Farm, Server, Counter, Instance, Avg. Value, Time. A red square in front of the server name indicates that the counter is in Critical state. Yellow square indicates a warning status. Clicking on any Performance Alert will open a detailed view on the right hand side of the window. There you can find more information about the specific Performance Counter. Such as its description, the defined values for the thresholds, and the graph with the collected values. For more information on how to manage the alerts, see this article.

Events

Events tab will be populated as soon as you define a new Alert. For more information on how to do this, click here.

The columns we provide here are: Farm, Server, Name, Query, Time. The square in the Server column is always grey and is indicative of Events Alert. Clicking on a Events Alert will open the details on the right hand side, which will show you the results of the defined query. Clicking on the View Details will preselect the query and take you to the Event Viewer screen.

SharePoint Status

SharePoint Status tab will automatically be populated. By default Syskit Insights checks the SharePoint Timer Service status and the Central Administration (CA) site status. If the Timer Service job is stopped or the CA is unavailable, you will be notified every 30 minutes. The columns we provide here are: Farm, Server, Source, Value, Time. See the Manage Alerts article to see how you can check the status of another site.

Latency

The Latency tab will automatically populate as soon as the application finishes the first ping interval. That usually happens within 15 minutes of starting the application. The columns provided here are: Farm, Server, Bad Pings (number of), and Time. Click on the desired line to open the latency intervals details on the right side of the screen. This shows the maximum latency in that interval, number of pings sent and received, and number of pings that took longer than 1 ms.

Page Performance

The Page Performance tab will only populate if you have added SharePoint pages to monitor. X-SPHealthScore and Page Response Time headers are monitored by default. For more information about Page Performance, click here.

Sending the notification

In order to receive the email notification of your alerts you need to enable them. Go to Settings -> Email settings. Select the: "Send email notifications when alerts occur" and fill out all the required fields.

For more information on Insights features see this article.

According to Microsoft's guidelines, intra-farm latency should be <1 ms one way 99.9% of the time over a period of ten minutes. Microsoft defines Intra-farm latency as the latency between the front-end web servers and the database servers. However, we take it a step further and ping every server in the farm, not just the database server.

On the left side of the screen, you can observe the success rate of pings sent to each monitored server.

• Success Rate column: Gives you the number of successful pings for that server in the last interval. The interval will be displayed as critical if the ping success rate is not over 99.9%.

• Intra-farm Latency column: Tells you if the latency for given server is according to the guidelines (99.9% of pings under 1 ms in a 10-minute interval).

On the right side are server interval details. Click on any server and its data will appear.

Pings are sent in 10-minute intervals.

• The Sent Pings column gives you the number of sent/received pings.

• Pings longer than 1 ms tells you how many pings took longer than 1 ms. By default, the value is set to 1 ms per Microsoft's guidelines.. This can be changed in Settings -> Intra-farm Latency Configuration

• Maximum Latency tells you the maximum encountered latency in that interval.

We are sorry to hear you are leaving the Syskit family, but here are the steps how to uninstall the Syskit Insights.

1. Open the Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features.

2. Find Syskit Insights and click the Uninstall button.

3. Select Uninstall option from the wizard.

4. Click Next and wait for the wizard to remove Insights.

5. Your Syskit Insights application has been successfully removed!

If you have any suggestions how to improve our product, wish to express your dissatisfaction or share the reason why you removed our application, please feel free to contact us.

First you need to:

Add New Page 1. On the Page Performance tab, click Add New.

1. Select the farm for which you wish to add pages (if you have more than one).

2. Enter the pages you wish to monitor, either one by one or by importing them from a file. When importing from a file, put each page on a separate line.

3. Click Import and the import check will start.

   • For on-premises pages, we use the service account you provided in the configuration wizard. You need to ensure that this account has the necessary permissions.

   • If you want to monitor a SharePoint Online site, a popup window will ask you to provide the required credentials. When prompted to remember the login, make sure to click yes. The benefits are:

     • Credentials will be reused for all connections to the same tenant.

     • The credentials will be valid for more than 5 days.

     • For more about monitoring SharePoint Online sites, click here.

The pages added will be shown on the Page Performance dashboard.

Page Performance Dashboard

The data shown here are average values, calculated for the period selected in the data range filter, which is by default the last 24h.

If you want to receive a notification when a metric exceeds its threshold, then set up an alert. For more information on how to do so, please see this article.

Metrics over their threshold will be red on the dashboard. If they are under their threshold, they will be green.

If you click on a page (each entire row is clickable), you will see detailed information about that page, such as SharePoint header metrics and file requests.

Page Headers

• Uptime - Calculated time of page availability during the selected period (based on the data range filter).

• X-SPHealthScore - The server can monitor the current load and its ability to process requests. If it is monitoring the load, it will return load information to the client in the X-SPHealthScore header. This header is between 0 and 10, where 0 represents a low load and a high ability to process requests and 10 represent a high load and that the server is throttling requests to maintain adequate throughput.

• SPRequestDuration - This is how long, in milliseconds, a request took to process on the server.

• SPIISLatency - The time in milliseconds taken in the front-end web server after the request has been received by the front-end web server before the web application begins processing the request.

• Page Response Time - The total time in milliseconds required to download the page.

• SPRequestGuid - While ULS logs have correlation IDs, SharePoint pages have request GUIDs.

File Requests

The File Requests feature simulates real-world page usage. There is no caching and the numbers shown are what a real user might expect when accessing the page. Syskit Insights will try to load and emulate the browser opening the page.

The data shown are from the 20-second interval during which Syskit Insights monitors the page.

You can monitor Size, Load Time, and Item Count for certain elements of the page. These elements are: HTML, JavaScript, images, CSS, and Fonts. Syskit Insights uses The Coach to monitor performance of your pages, and from the information collected, we calculate the Page Score. For more information, please see this link.

On the right-hand side, there is a waterfall model of a page, like the one you can find in Google Chrome's DevTools, showing you every element loaded.

File requests are collected every 6 hours.

The Syskit Insights Health Overview gives you an instant overview on the health of your farms, which is based on the data gathered for a selected farm and time interval. An overview can be generated for two time intervals — “Yesterday” or “Last 7 days.” It shows trend comparisons for the current interval and for the previously completed time interval (in percentages). Each report is divided into the following sections:

Events

The Events section provides an overview of events and collected logs within a selected time interval. It has two categories:

• Index size— the total disk space occupied by Syskit Insights and how much it has grown since the start of the interval. Its growth depends upon the farm size. Insights will stop collecting data once a maximum limit has been reached.

• Entries—an overview of entries for that interval. Entries are sorted by level (Critical, Unexpected, Warning, Error and Exception) and by type (ULS, SQL and Event Log).

For more details on Events, please see this article.

Performance

The Performance section provides a performance overview for your farm for a selected time interval. It is divided into the following three categories:

• Incidents — the number of performance incidents that have occurred in a set interval;

• By category — the counters that have generated the highest number of alerts in a set interval;

• By server — the servers that have generated the highest number of alerts in a set interval.

For more details on performance please see this article.

Alerts

The Alerts section shows the number of alerts generated in a specified time interval and which types of alerts occurred most frequently during this interval.

For more details on Alerts see this article.

SharePoint Services

The SharePoint Services section provides an overview of SharePoint services, giving you an insight into how many services were stopped, and also how many alerts were generated for the Central Administration or how many service alerts were generated in a specified interval.

For detailed information on managing your SharePoint services, please see this article.

Page Performance

The Page Performance section provides a performance overview on the time interval of any SharePoint pages you monitor. It shows the number of alerts that were generated for all headers and file requests that you have previously enabled for monitoring.

For more details on page performance, please see this article.

Latency

The Latency section shows the latency statistics for average ping time between the servers of your farm for a selected interval. It highlights whether there was high latency on the servers. Microsoft recommends that pings should take less than 1 ms, to avoid bad user experience. Pings are recorded every 10 minutes.

For more details on latency, please see this article.

Schedule

If you wish, you can schedule a health report. To do so, click on the Schedule button and enable Report Scheduling. After that you can choose which sections you want to include in the report, and opt to receive info on report frequency and send time. To receive the report, your email settings must be configured.

On the main application window click Farms. You will see a number of added farms, servers and a License Server Limit, as well as an overview of all the servers in farms. You can also see which SQL servers are in a cluster and instances that are monitored.

There are three ways to add a new farm:

Add Farm

To add a farm you simply need to enter a name of the SharePoint server which is a part of that farm. We will autodiscover all other servers in the farm.

1. Enter (SharePoint) server name or FQDN and press Test Connection. If the everything is in order green check mark will appear. Click Next to continue. 1. In the next step you will see the detected farm. You can configure server roles, edit ULS Path, modify detected farms' name or remove servers from a farm.

• If you wish to add an extra server to the farm click Add Server.

  • Enter the server name, select a role and click Add server. When done click Save and the server will be added to the farm.

    1. Finally you will see an overview on how many servers you are adding. Click Finish to save your work.

Scan

1. You can search for Organisational Units by name, or you can use a dropdown menu to select the ones you want.

2. After the scan is complete you will see the detected farm/s. You can configure server roles, edit ULS Path, modify detected farms' name or remove servers from a farm.

   • If you wish to add an extra server to the farm click Add Server.

     • Enter the server name, select a role and click Add server. When done click Save and the server will be added to the farm.

3. Finally you will see an overview on how many servers you are adding. Click Finish to save your work.

Import from SPDocKit

• If you wish to add an extra server to the farm click Add Server.

  • Enter the server name, select a role and click Add server. When done click Save and the server will be added to the farm.

    1. Finally you will see an overview on how many farms and servers you are adding. Click Finish to save your work.

Manage farms:

Also, you can manage already added farms by clicking the Manage button.

• You can configure server roles, edit ULS Path, modify detected farms' name or remove servers from a farm.

• To add a new server click Add Server.

  • Enter the server name, select a role and click Add server. When done click Save and the server will be added to the farm.

• Note that you can also add 3rd party servers, such as: Office Web Apps Server...

• When done, click Save to confirm your changes.

Refresh farm configuration:

When adding a new server to a farm, you don’t need to add it manually. Simply click the Refresh Farm Configuration button and all new servers will be added. Also, your ULS location, if changed in the meantime, will also be updated. A system job will also automatically perform this refresh every night at 4:00 a.m.

Syskit Insights monitors your server performance by periodically collecting performance counter values. The counters are split into several templates that are applied to your server based on the role it plays in your farm.

Most counters have a critical and warning threshold defined. When the counter value remains above the threshold for an extended period of time it will be classified with a critical or warning status. This in turn will affect the status of the server seen on the dashboards and it will cause an Alert to be sent - if you have that option turned on. Please note that these threshold can be changed to suit your needs more reliably.

See this article for some guidelines on performance testing and tuning.

Below are the counters that Syskit tracks with their corresponding (default) critical and warning thresholds.

General

Default template contains counters that are collected for all servers.

% Processor Time

% Processor Time is the percentage of elapsed time that all of process threads used the processor to execution instructions. An instruction is the basic unit of execution in a computer, a thread is the object that executes instructions, and a process is the object created when a program is run. Code executed to handle some hardware interrupts and trap conditions are included in this count.

Warning when the value is above 85%. Critical when the value is above 95%.

RAM (GB)

Displays the amount of used memory, in GB, on a computer.

Warning when there is less than 0.5 GB available. Critical when there is less than 0.25 GB available.

Network Usage (Kbps)

Number of kilobits received and sent per second on the network adapter.

Warning when the value is above 5000 Kbps. Critical when the value is above 10000 Kbps.

Disk I/O (bytes/sec)

Number of bytes read from and written to the disk per second.

Warning when the value is above 100 bytes/sec. Critical when the value is above 200 bytes/sec.

IIS/ASP.NET

IIS/ASP.NET template helps you keep an eye on your IIS servers in SharePoint farm. Diagnose various problems and performance issues with ease.

Current Connections

Current Connections is the current number of connections established with the Web service.

Bytes Total/sec

Bytes Total/sec is the sum of Bytes Sent/sec and Bytes Received/sec. This is the total rate of bytes transferred by the Web service.

Get Requests/sec

The rate HTTP requests using the GET method are made. Get requests are the most common HTTP request.

Post Requests/sec

The rate HTTP requests using the POST method are made.

Total Application Pool Recycles

The number of times that the application pool has been recycled since Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) started.

Requests Queued

The number of requests waiting to be processed.

Warning when the value is above 400. Critical when the value is above 1000.

Requests Rejected

The number of requests rejected because the request queue was full.

Warning when the value is above 2. Critical when the value is above 5.

Worker Process Restarts

Number of times a worker process has restarted on the machine.

Warning when the value is above 1. Critical when the value is above 5.

Request Wait Time

The number of milliseconds the most recent request was waiting in the queue.

Warning when the value is above 800. Critical when the value is above 1200.

SQL

SQL template enables you to efficiently monitor your SQL servers. With specified counters you can quickly find possible bottlenecks and performance issues.

User Connections

Number of users connected to the system.

Buffer Cache Hit Ratio (%)

Percentage of pages that were found in the buffer pool without having to incur a read from disk.

Warning when the value is below 90. Critical when the value is below 80.

Lazy Writes/sec

Number of buffers written by buffer manager's lazy writer.

Warning when the value is above 15. Critical when the value is above 20.

Page Life Expectancy (s)

Number of seconds a page will stay in the buffer pool without references.

Warning when the value is below 400. Critical when the value is below 250.

Batch Requests/sec

Number of SQL batch requests received by server.

Warning when the value is above 1000. Critical when the value is above 1500.

SQL Compilations/sec

Number of SQL compilations.

Warning when the value is above 100. Critical when the value is above 150.

SQL Re-Compilations/sec

Number of SQL re-compiles.

Warning when the value is above 1. Critical when the value is above 2.

Page Splits/sec

Number of page splits per second that occur as a result of overflowing index pages.

Warning when the value is above 200. Critical when the value is above 300.

Full Scans/sec

Number of unrestricted full scans. These can either be base table or full index scans.

Latch Waits/sec

Number of latch requests that could not be granted immediately and had to wait before being granted.

Total Latch Wait Time (ms)

Total latch wait time (milliseconds) for latch requests that had to wait in the last second.

Lock Waits/sec

Number of lock requests that could not be satisfied immediately and required the caller to wait before being granted the lock.

Warning when the value is above 1. Critical when the value is above 2.

Transactions/sec

Number of transactions started for the database.

Processor Queue Length

Processor Queue Length is the number of threads in the processor queue. Unlike the disk counters, this counter shows ready threads only, not threads that are running. There is a single queue for processor time even on computers with multiple processors. Therefore, if a computer has multiple processors, you need to divide this value by the number of processors servicing the workload. A sustained processor queue of greater than two threads generally indicates processor congestion.

Warning when the value is above 2. Critical when the value is above 5.

Disk

Disk template helps you keep an eye on your disks across the SharePoint farm. Diagnose possible bottlenecks and performance issues with ease.

Avg. Disk Queue Length

Avg. Disk Queue Length is the average number of both read and write requests that were queued for the selected disk during the sample interval.

Warning when the value is above 2. Critical when the value is above 4.

Disk Transfers/sec

Disk Transfers/sec is the rate of read and write operations on the disk.

Warning when the value is above 200 transfers/sec. Critical when the value is above 400 transfers/sec.

Free GB

Free GB displays the unallocated space on the disk drive in GB.

Warning when the value is below 5 GB. Critical when the value is below 3 GB.

Pages/sec

Pages/sec is the rate at which pages are read from or written to disk to resolve hard page faults. This counter is a primary indicator of the kinds of faults that cause system-wide delays. It is the sum of Memory\Pages Input/sec and Memory\Pages Output/sec. It is counted in numbers of pages, so it can be compared to other counts of pages, such as Memory\Page Faults/sec, without conversion. It includes pages retrieved to satisfy faults in the file system cache (usually requested by applications) non-cached mapped memory files.

Warning when the value is above 20. Critical when the value is above 50.

Disk Reads/sec

Disk Reads/sec is the rate of read operations on the disk.

Avg. Disk Read Queue Length

Avg. Disk Read Queue Length is the average number of read requests that were queued for the selected disk during the sample interval.

Avg. Disk Write Queue Length

Avg. Disk Write Queue Length is the average number of write requests that were queued for the selected disk during the sample interval.

% Idle Time

% Idle Time reports the percentage of time during the sample interval that the disk was idle.

Warning when the value is below 20. Critical when the value is below 10.

% Free Space

% Free Space is the percentage of total usable space on the selected logical disk drive that was free.

Warning when the value is below 30. Critical when the value is below 20.

Cache Faults/sec

Cache Faults/sec is the rate at which faults occur when a page sought in the file system cache is not found and must be retrieved from elsewhere in memory (a soft fault) or from disk (a hard fault). The file system cache is an area of physical memory that stores recently used pages of data for applications. Cache activity is a reliable indicator of most application I/O operations. This counter shows the number of faults, without regard for the number of pages faulted in each operation.

Critical when the value is above 1.

% Usage

The amount of the Page File instance in use in percent. See also Process\Page File Bytes.

Warning when the value is below 50. Critical when the value is below 75.

% Usage Peak

The peak usage of the Page File instance in percent. See also Process\Page File Bytes Peak.

Total Bytes/sec

Total Bytes/sec is the rate the Server is reading and writing data to and from the files for the clients on this CPU. This value is a measure of how busy the Server is.

Page Reads/sec

Page Reads/sec is the rate at which the disk was read to resolve hard page faults. It shows the number of reads operations, without regard to the number of pages retrieved in each operation. Hard page faults occur when a process references a page in virtual memory that is not in working set or elsewhere in physical memory, and must be retrieved from disk. This counter is a primary indicator of the kinds of faults that cause system-wide delays. It includes read operations to satisfy faults in the file system cache (usually requested by applications) and in non-cached mapped memory files. Compare the value of Memory\Pages Reads/sec to the value of Memory\Pages Input/sec to determine the average number of pages read during each operation.

.NET

.NET template helps you track .NET counters on servers in SharePoint farm. Diagnose various problems and performance issues with ease.

Gen 0 Collections

This counter displays the number of times the generation 0 objects (youngest most recently allocated) are garbage collected (Gen 0 GC) since the start of the application. Gen 0 GC occurs when the available memory in generation 0 is not sufficient to satisfy an allocation request. This counter is incremented at the end of a Gen 0 GC. Higher generation GCs include all lower generation GCs. This counter is explicitly incremented when a higher generation (Gen 1 or Gen 2) GC occurs. Global counter value is not accurate and should be ignored. This counter displays the last observed value.

Gen 1 Collections

This counter displays the number of times the generation 1 objects are garbage collected since the start of the application. The counter is incremented at the end of a Gen 1 GC. Higher generation GCs include all lower generation GCs. This counter is explicitly incremented when a higher generation (Gen 2) GC occurs. Global counter value is not accurate and should be ignored. This counter displays the last observed value.

Gen 2 Collections

This counter displays the number of times the generation 2 objects (older) are garbage collected since the start of the application. The counter is incremented at the end of a Gen 2 GC (also called full GC). Global counter value is not accurate and should be ignored. This counter displays the last observed value.

% Time in GC % Time in GC is the percentage of elapsed time that was spent in performing a garbage collection (GC) since the last GC cycle. This counter is usually an indicator of the work done by the Garbage Collector on behalf of the application to collect and compact memory. This counter is updated only at the end of every GC and the counter value reflects the last observed value its not an average.

Search

Search templates helps you track a number of 'search' relevant counters on servers in SharePoint farm. Diagnose various problems and performance issues with ease.

Retries

The total number of times a document access has been retried. Having this number high may indicate a problem with accessing the data.

Crawls in progress

Number of crawls in progress.

Transactions Completed

Shows the current number of completed documents in the transactions queue.

Transactions Waiting

The number of documents waiting to be processed. When this number goes to zero the catalogue is idle. This number indicates the total queue size of unprocessed documents in the gatherer.

Transactions In Progress

The number of documents in progress.

Documents Processed Rate

The number of documents processed per second.

Documents Success Rate

The number of successfully filtered documents per second.

Syskit Insights Web Interface

Syskit Insights Configuration Wizard has a separate step where users can configure the Syskit Insights web interface. Users can choose to enable it or disable it completely. Additionally, users can define which user accounts can access the Syskit Insights web interface. By default, only the user account running the Configuration Wizard and service user account are added to the group of users with permission to access the Syskit Insights web interface. Users can add unlimited user accounts to this group. The people picker will search Active Directories for the users.

The Syskit Insights web interface is hosted at http://{servername}:{port} or at https://{servername}:{port}. In order to use https, the user must set up the certificate manually. You can follow the steps here.

Browser Compatibility

Syskit Insights has only been tested on the latest version of Google Chrome but should also work on the latest versions of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.

In case there is an instance or an entire hard drive you do not wish to track, here is how you can disable them.

Disable the entire hard drive:

To disable the entire hard drive, run the following scrip against the Syskit Insights database. Set the value of variable Enabled to 1 or 0 (0 = Disabled, 1 = Enabled). Also, input the Server and Disk name as they are seen in the application.

UPDATE 
    Discs_Table 
SET 
    Enabled = 0 /* 0 = Disable, 1 = Enable */
FROM 
    [dbo].[Discs] as Discs_Table
    JOIN [EventCollection].[MonitoringServers] as Servers_Table ON Servers_Table.ID = Discs_Table.TerminalServerID
WHERE
    Servers_Table.Name = 'Insert server name here' /* Server name */
    AND Discs_Table.Name = 'Insert disk drive name' /* Disk name */

Disable a specific instance:

If there is an instance, for example - hard drive instance, that you do not wish to track, here is what you need to do in order to disable it. Run the following scrip against the Syskit Insights database.

Set the value to the variable Enabled to 1 or 0 (0 = Disabled, 1 = Enabled). Also, input the Server, Counter and Instance name as they are seen in the application.

UPDATE 
    ServerInstance_Table 
SET 
    Enabled = 0 /* 0 = Disable, 1 = Enable */
FROM 
    [PerformanceCounters].[ServerInstances] as ServerInstance_Table
    JOIN [EventCollection].[MonitoringServers] as Servers_Table ON Servers_Table.ID = ServerInstance_Table.TerminalServerID
    JOIN [PerformanceCounters].[Counters] as Counters_Table ON Counters_Table.CounterID = ServerInstance_Table.CounterID
    JOIN [PerformanceCounters].[Instances] as Instances_Table ON Instances_Table.InstanceID = ServerInstance_Table.InstanceID
WHERE 
    Servers_Table.Name = 'Put Server name here' /* Server name */
    AND Counters_Table.DisplayName = 'Put Counter name here'  /* Counter name */
    AND Instances_Table.Name = 'Put Instance name here' /* Instance name */

If you require more assistance with this issue, don't hesitate to ask us.

If you wish to track additional services, this article explains how to add a custom Service alert into the application. Run the following script against the Syskit Insights database.

INSERT INTO [Alerts].[AlertDefinitions] (FarmId, Name, IgnorePeriod, Type, Configuration, Enabled, SendToDefaultEmail, SendToAdditionalEmails, AdditionalEmailRecipients)
SELECT Farm.ID,
   '{AlertName}',
   30,
   1,
   '<SearchServiceCheckConfig xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/SysKit.Insights.Business.Alerting.CreateConfigurations">
       <ServiceNameToCheck>-- SERVICE NAME HERE ---</ServiceNameToCheck>
   </SearchServiceCheckConfig>',
   1,
   1,
   0,
   ''
From [dbo].[Farms] as Farm
WHERE Farm.Name = '{FarmName}'

Replace the properties in curly brackets (AlertName and FarmName) and input the Service name you wish to start tracking. Most common request we have been receiving is to add a Workflow Manager Service. In that case you would input: WorkflowServiceBackend as that is the service name.

If you require more assistance with this issue, don't hesitate to ask us.

To customize Syskit Insights settings click the Settings button located in the bottom left corner. 5. On the settings screen the available settings are divided into:

• General settings

• Farm settings scoped by each farm.

• Agent settings scoped by each agent.

Available general settings

• Email settings

  • A list of settings required to send email notifications when alert occurs.

Available farm settings:

• Assigned agent

  • When the Syskit Insights Agent starts for the first time, it will be associated with all the farms in your Syskit database. If at some point you connect another farm to your Syskit database, it will be associated with the first free active agent.

  • If the agent associated by default is not satisfactory, change this option.

  • If for some reason you wish to stop monitoring a farm, just select None as the desired agent.

  • One agent can be assigned to multiple farms.

• ULS collection configuration

  • Here you can change which ULS event levels you want to collect. You can choose from the standard SharePoint ULS levels.

  • All of the ULS categories and sources are preselected by default.

• Windows Event Log collection configuration

  • Here you can change which Windows Event Levels and Logs you wish to monitor

  • Configure Windows event sources to monitor. By default SPDocKit, SharePoint and SQL are added.

• SQL collection configuration

  • Enabled by default.

• Performance monitoring

  • Enabled by default.

• Intra-farm Latency Configuration

  • Enabled by default.

  • Ping response time threshold: 1ms by default

  • Ping rate above threshold tolerance: 0.1% by default

Available agent options

• Enable/Disable data collection

  • Will stop/start data collection (log and performance data) from all farms associated with the selected Syskit Insights Agent.

• Collection interval

  • How often to collect log data (default is 15 seconds).

• Data retention period

  • How long do you wish to keep the data (default is 7 days for both Search and Performance).

• Max index size

  • Data collection will stop when this limit is reached.

• Performance data collection interval

  • How often to collect performance data (default is 60 seconds)

• Remove agent - only supported for an inactive agent.

  • Uninstall the selected Syskit Insights Agent form the machine where it is located.

  • You can do so by uninstalling Syskit Insights completely.

  • Wait a couple of minutes for the agent to register as offline.

  • Remove the agent by using this option.

Performance Counters

Here you can manage the thresholds and the notification settings of every performance counter. They are divided into six categories or templates: General, IIS/ASP.NET, SQL/ SQL(Named), Disk, .NET and Search.

• Raise alert for this counter - enable this if you wish to receive an alert when the counter reaches warning or critical threshold. Also, if any counter is either in critical or warning state, the entire server on Performance tab will bi marked accordingly.

• Thresholds - most of the counters have a predefined value. However, these values are not "one size fits all" so you can change them to suit your needs.

  • Enabling the Threshold checkbox means that you will be alerted (Alerts tab in the application) when a given counter reaches its critical or warning limit.

• Send to default email address will send a notification (email) to addresses given in Settings -> Email Settings.

• Send to alternate email address - here you can define extra emails of people that you wish to receive the notification.

Events

Opening the Events tab of Manage Alerts form will show you a list of all current Alerts as well as the time the alert was last sent on. To create a new alert click New Alert: 1. Enter the alert name. 1. Enter your search query choose if you wish to query only the ULS logs, Event or SQL logs. Naturally you can also search for every given type of log. 1. Filter by the farm and choose how often you wish to be notified.

1. If you wish to be notified about the alert via email check the Send to default email address checkbox. Also, you can send additional emails with selecting Send to alternate email address.

If you want to edit an already existing alert navigate to aforementioned list of alerts and on the right hand side click the edit icon for a given alert.

SharePoint Status

Site collection alerts

Central Administration status is changed

• We will continuously ping the Central Administration site and notify you if it is not accessible. By default, you will receive an alert every 30 minutes.

Services alerts

SharePoint Timer Service is stopped

• Status of the SharePoint Timer Service is checked for every server in the farm. You will be alerted if the status is stopped or stopping. By default you will receive an alert every 30 minutes.

SharePoint Search Service is stopped

• The status of the SharePoint Timer Service is checked for every server in the farm. You will be alerted if the status is stopped or stopping. By default, you will receive an alert every 30 minutes.

SharePoint User Profile service is stopped/not detected

• You will be alerted if the status is stopped or stopping. By default, you will receive an alert every 30 minutes. Note: The service is not available on SharePoint Server 2016.

Intra-farm Latency

• You will be notified when the observed latency exceeds configured values.

Notifications

• Send to default email address will send a notification (email) to addresses given in Settings -> Email Settings.

• Send to alternate email address - here you can define extra emails of people that you wish to receive the notification.

Page Performance

Here you can configure which metric to monitor in order to send alerts if received values exceed set thresholds.

• Enable Page Performance Alerting - check this to enable the alerting.

General

• SPRequestDuration - by default 150ms and OFF

• SPIISLatency - by default 9ms and OFF

• X-SPHealthScore - by default 4 and ON

• Page Response Time - by default 5000ms and ON

Javascript

• File Size - default 2000kB and OFF

• File Load Time - - default 2000ms and OFF

CSS

• File Size - by default 2000kB and OFF

• File Load Time - by default 2000ms and OFF

Notifications

• Send to default email address will send a notification (email) to addresses given in Settings -> Email Settings.

• Send to alternate email address - here you can define extra emails of people that you wish to receive the notification.

Summary

The problem may appear when scanning a certain Organizational Unit(OU). For example if you have an OU named SharePointFarm with 7 SharePoint servers, but a SQL server is located in another OU. The message during the scan will say: "Processed: x out of 7 servers." While in fact the number of discovered servers will be 8 (because of the SQL server).

Solution

After the discovery process is finished go to the Alerts tab -> click Manage. Locate the Farm in which you have missing servers -> click Add Server and manually add the missing server. You will need to provide a Server Name and a Server Role(s). For more information on how to do this see

Summary: The problem appears when Syskit Insights is installed on a laptop, and when laptop is put into sleep mode. Personal computers (PCs) and servers (which does not have a sleep mode), are not affected by this. What happens, is that when you turn on the sleep mode, Syskit Insights Agent will "remember" the last collected value and "copy" it for every other performance data collection interval. There is no extra work done on a database so you do not have worry about that. The Agent starts to save new values the moment you turn on your laptop.

In the picture above the laptop was put into sleep mode at 16:00h and it was turned on the next morning at 08:00h

Solution: There is no workaround.

Summary: The problem appears when the user is using the web application to add a site for which he/she does not have permission. In most cases, this will happen with a SPO (SharePoint Online) site. To be more precise, the problem lies with the authentication process for the given site. If you already have the required permissions, eg. for a on-premise site, you should be able to add the given site.

Solution: You should always use the Syskit Insights desktop application when adding new pages for monitoring.

If you do not have any on-premises farms and you want to monitor the performance of your SharePoint Online (SPO) pages only, this is what you need to do:

1. When you install and start the application, the farms tab will automatically open. Since you do not have any on-premises farms, click the button “Use Syskit Insights to monitor SharePoint Online.”

2. You will be automatically redirected to the add page screen of Page Performance.

3. Once there, simply input the URL of a page you want to monitor or import URLs from a file. When importing from a file, put each page on a separate line.

4. Click Import and the import check will start. A pop-up window will ask you to give consent and to provide your credentials. When prompted to “remember the login” make sure to click yes. The benefits are:

   • Credentials will be reused for all connections to the same tenant.

   • The credentials will be valid for more than 5 days.

After adding all the pages you wish, they will be shown on the Page Performance dashboard.

And that is it. For more general information on the Page Performance feature, please see

There are a couple of steps needed to set up the Syskit Insights Web Application to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. If there are multiple agents connected to the same database, the following steps need to be performed on all the servers where Syskit Insights is installed:

1. Set up Syskit Insights

2. Set up URL reservation

1. Setup Syskit Insights

The first thing to do is to stop both Syskit Insights Agent and Syskit Insights Maintenance Job in the Windows Services window on a server where Syskit Insights is installed. After both services are stopped (Syskit Insights Agent can take some time to stop), the file at %ProgramData%/SysKit/Insights/Service/settings.xml has to be modified. Using any text editor, set tag “SslEnabled” to “true”. After modifying the file, there needs to be the following tag in the file:

This setting will configure Syskit Insights to serve its web application over HTTPS.

2. Set up URL reservation

In order to set up Syskit Insights to serve content over HTTPS, users have to manually generate an SSL certificate. Using a self-signed certificate is not recommended and will not work on client machines unless those certificates are added to the trusted list of certificates on the client machines.

Once the certificate is obtained, it has to be installed to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities on the server that is hosting the Syskit Insights web application.

After the certificate is installed, users need to execute the following commands (the command prompt or PowerShell shell has to be open with the local administrator account):

3. Update SysKitInsights database

Lastly, hostname in SyskitInsights database must be updated.

The following SQL query should be executed:

Note: When using HTTPS, Syskit Insights requires you to confirm the agent URL on each startup. If no changes were made, click the Set button, and you are good to go.

Search

A search query consists of terms and operators. By default, the AND operator is utilized when constructing queries. Terms can be a single word or a phrase. A phrase is a group of words enclosed with double quotes.

Input your query in the searchbox, then press enter or the search button to start the search. Once you have a set of results, you can easily drill down by using the refiners on the left side of the screen or by clicking on various links in the result text.

Fields

By default, all fields are searched. To limit your term to a field, type the field name followed by a colon ":" and your term.

To get events from the SP2016WFE1 server, you would enter:

Server: SP2016WFE1

Some useful fields:

• Server

• Level

• CorrelationID

• Source

• Category

Not all result types have the same fields. For a complete list of fields click .

Wildcard searches

Single and multiple character wildcard queries are supported. Use "?" for a single character wildcard and "*" for a multiple character wildcard search.

Please note that searches with a starting wildcard are not supported. Use wildcard searches sparingly, they can be a performance killer.

Operators

You can combine your terms using logical operators. The supported operators are AND, OR, NOT and "-". Note that the operators must be UPPERCASED.

AND operator

This is the default operator. The query: database error is equivalent to database AND error. Both terms must exist somewhere in the document. You can also use && instead of the word AND.

OR operator

Use this operator when you want to match multiple terms. Server:Server1 OR Server:Server2 will return events from both Server1 and Server2. You can also use || instead of the word OR.

NOT operator

Used to exclude events from your search. Level:Critical NOT administration will return critical events that do not have the term administration. You can also use ! instead of the word NOT.

Similar results can be achieved by using the – operator. Level:critical – administration.

Clause grouping

Use parentheses to form subqueries. (Server:Server1 OR Server:Server2) AND Level:Error will return all events with Level equal to errors from both Server1 and Server2.

You can also write your queries in the following way Server:(Server1 OR Server2)

Clause grouping is recommended when writing queries with more than two clauses and different logical operators. Ie. instead of test error OR Server:Server1 use the query: (test error) OR Server:Server1.

Special characters

The following is a list of special character that are used in the query syntax.

• • && || ! ( ) {}[ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \

If you wish to use these characters in your terms, you must escape them with a .

There are a couple of exceptions:

• If you are searching for a url, everything is escaped automatically.

• \ is escaped automatically.

• : is escaped automatically unless used to denote a field.

Examples

Example 1: Query Level:Critical database will match events that contain the word "database" and that have a Level of Critical.</p>

Example 2: Query (Level:Exception OR Level:Critical) database will match events that contain the word "database" and that have a Level of Critical or Exception.

Example 3: Query Level:Critical "access the database" will match events that have a Level of Critical and that contain the words "access" "the" "database" in the exact order.

Example 4: Query Level:Critical admin* will match events that have a Level of Critical and contain a word that starts with "admin".

Example 5: Query Level:Critical Server:Server1 will match events that occurred on Server1 with a Level of Critical.</p>

Example 6: Query Level:Critical AND Server:Server1, same as example 5.

Example 7: Query Level:Critical AND Server:Server1– database will match events that occurred on Server1 with a Level of Critical that do not contain the word "database".

Example 8: Query database AND NOT (Level:Critical OR Level:Unexpected) will match events that contain the word "database" and not of a Level of Critical and are not of a Level of Unexpected.

Example 9: Query SPUpdatedConcurrencyException Source:"SharePoint Server Search" will match events that contain the word "SPUpdatedConcurrencyException" and have a source of SharePoint Server Search. Note the use of double quotations since the Source is comprised of multiple words.

Fields by result type

ULS fields

• Server

• Level

• Source

• Category

• EventID

• CorrelationID

• Message

Event Log fields

• Server

• Source

• Category

• Level

• UserName

• Message

SQL fields

• Server

• Source

• Message

Change the index location to a different server or migrate the SPDocKit Insights Agent

If you wish to transfer the Syskit Insights application (the agent that does the collection) AND at the same time keep the existing data here is what you need to do:

1. Stop the Syskit Insights Agent service and the Syskit Insights Maintenance service.

2. Install the Syskit Insights on a different server.

3. Copy the entire index from the old to the new location.

4. Start the Configuration Wizard and:

   1. Connect to the "old", already used Syskit Insights database

   2. Connect to the new index location.

5. Finish the Configuration Wizard, start the application and that's it.

Change the index location on the same server

1. Stop the Syskit Insights Agent service and the Syskit Insights Maintenance service.

2. Copy the entire index from the old to the new location.

3. Start the Configuration Wizard and:

   1. Connect to the "old", already used Syskit Insights database

   2. Connect to the new index location.

4. Finish the Configuration Wizard, start the application and that's it.

When I use SPDocKit database to import farms, does the Syskit Insights application continue to use that database?

Once the farms are imported from the SPDocKit database, Syskit Insights does not continue to use it. Instead, Syskit Insights uses its own database. See here for system requirements.

If I wish to monitor more than one farm do I need a database for each one?

No, Syskit Insights uses the same database to store information about every farm you wish to monitor.

Does all index data go into the same index or are there different indexes for different farms?

Each Syskit Insights' agent can use only one index location.

Are there installation instructions or best practices available for maximum index size?

It is very difficult to hypothesize on the required index size as this largely depends on your infrastructure and how big your farm/s are. Recommended minimum of 200GB disk space should be enough to store the data (ULS, SQL logs and Windows Event logs) of three SharePoint farms (Test, Preproduction, Production). However, please note, that index size can vary from a few gigabytes up to a terabyte of data depending on which Event Levels you are collecting and again, on your infrastructure. These Event Levels can be changed in available farm settings in order to optimize the amount of collected data.