SharePoint 2013 has introduced
some truly impressive new capabilities for monitoring the Search
service application. The extent of SharePoint 2010’s Search monitoring
was a crawl log to report crawl failures, and the rather ambiguously
named “Recent crawl rate” and “Recent query rate” metrics. Together
this provided only the most basic troubleshooting capability, and
almost any search-related issue would land you knee-deep in log files
with little clue of what you were looking for.
SharePoint 2013 has completely revamped the
Search service application and its monitoring, and it now provides a
wealth of information on the current and historical performance of the
Search service application. The same crawl log information is still
available, but it has now been supplemented with filterable, sortable
data that SharePoint can plot out into extremely helpful graphs.
Additionally, reports are generated that go beyond evaluating the
performance of the search engine and move into evaluating the accuracy
and effectiveness of the search results that are generated.
If you browse to the Search Administration page
of your farm’s Search service application, the page initially looks
almost identical to the 2010 version. However, immediately noticeable
is the redesigned Search Application Topology section. It has been
reformatted into an icon-based view that makes it easier to quickly
identify which search components are running on which servers, and
their status. Figure 1 shows the different roles in the Search topology as they appear in Central Admin.
The Crawl Log
The second thing you may notice is that
the navigation menu to the left now has a dedicated Diagnostics
section. Hurray! Starting with the Crawl Log subsection, it also looks
almost identical to its counterpart in SharePoint 2010. However, there
are some subtle changes that are of exceptional value. Figure 2 shows the new Crawl Log screen.
Views you can see from the Crawl Log include:
- As in SharePoint 2010, the Content Source view shows a summary of
recent successes, warnings, errors, and deletes as organized by content
source. New in SharePoint 2013, it also tracks average crawl durations
over three periods of time: the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, and the
last 30 days. As in previous versions, the numbers in the columns
(e.g., Success, Warning, etc.) can be clicked to see a detailed report
of each item that was crawled.
- The Host Name view shows a similar summary of crawl results, but in
this case grouped by host name of the items, rather than content
source. This page is unchanged from SharePoint 2010; you don’t mess
with perfection.
- The Crawl History view arranges the logs according to recently
completed crawls, not only showing successes, warnings, errors, and
deletes, but also including numbers for items that were not modified,
items with security updates, and items with security errors. New to
SharePoint 2013 are the additional values of Crawl Rate (in documents
per second) and Repository Latency. Both of these new items are
clickable links leading to graphs, which are discussed in subsequent
sections.
- The Error Breakdown view (called Error Message in SharePoint 2010)
enables you to easily view the errors for a specific content source, or
a specific host inside of that content source. As with Host Name, this
view is unchanged from SharePoint 2010.
- New to SharePoint 2013 is the Databases view. This view offers
visibility into the usage of the crawl store databases associated with
the Search service application. This information is not likely to be
useful in most scenarios, but in an environment that utilizes multiple
SQL servers, it could be used to identify load on a given server.
- The URL view enables you to filter crawl logs based not only on
host name, but also on other portions of the URL, as well as status,
message, and start and end time. The options are the same as those
available in SharePoint 2010, but the layout of the dialog has been
rearranged a bit, and Content Source was changed from being an
alternative to the URL box to now being grouped with the other filters.
Crawl and Query Health Reports
The Crawl Health Reports and Crawl
Query Reports sections of Diagnostics are entirely new for SharePoint
2013. They expose a wealth of detailed information about the
performance of the Search service application, using a straightforward
interface that presents the information in an easily understood format.
Your best bet here is to explore the various
reports and consider various scenarios in which they could be useful.
For instance, if crawls are taking a long time to complete, you can
check the Crawl Rate report to determine whether one content source is
crawling slower than the others, or whether the service takes longer to
process certain types of updates. If your users are complaining about
slowness while a crawl is running, use the CPU and Memory Load report
to see how many system resources the crawl is consuming, and which
element of the crawling processes is having the greatest impact. If
your users are reporting slowness in search results, use the Overall
view of the Query Health Reports section to see if there has been a
recent spike in latency for the processing of server rendering, object
model, or back-end requests. Similarly, you could check the SharePoint
Search Provider view to determine whether the delay is related to
security trimming.
Usage Reports
The last of the new additions to
SharePoint 2013’s search monitoring capabilities are the Usage Reports.
These reports move beyond Search service performance, and into the
realm of search result accuracy and search trending. From these reports
you can pull information about the top queries by day or by month, or
track abandoned queries, which could indicate that users are not
finding what they’re looking for in the results.
SharePoint 2013 introduces the Query Rule into search as a means of improving the search experience. Query Rules
are rules that enable Search administrators to control how results are
ordered. They allow content that matches a rule to be promoted or
grouped with other results. The Query Rule reports are intended to
guide you first in shaping your search design to improve accuracy and
usefulness using Query Rules, and then in evaluating the effectiveness
of your changes.
