Showing posts with label SPDocKit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPDocKit. Show all posts

Sunday 2 February 2014

Audit and documenting a SharePoint on prem farm

Overview:  I have had and done several SharePoint infrastructure audits over the past few years.  These can vary from running through checklists of best practices to see what the customer setup has and finding out why they may of chosen to diverge. 

There is a lot of good tooling and checklists to help you audit your farm such as the built in Health analyser, central admin, PowerShell scripts and a great tool to help document your farm SPDocKitSetup from Acceleratio.

Tooling:
  • PowerShell
  • Health analyser
  • Central Admin
  • ULS logs and event logs
  • IIS (IIS RealTime Log Viewer)
  • Fiddler
  • SQL Management Studio, SQL profiler
  • Tool to audit and document your SharePoint farm: SPDocKitSetup
  • Third party tools like: DocAve and Metalogix (Ideara had a decent tool previously) can help audit and document your system.
The basic steps are:
  1. Document the farms topology;
  2. Verify versions and components installed;
  3. Compare MS recommendations to the farm settings, provide findings and allow the customer time to explain why these setting differ; and
  4. Monitoring, troubleshooting and performance.
Below are a few items to review:

SharePoint:
SharePoint Logs - I put these into my d drive
Multiple install accounts
List all customisations especially wsp and custom code
External Access - DMZ, network,

IIS:
Change the IIS default log location to a separate disk
Reclaim old IIS logs (Backup and remove from WFE's)
IIS RealTime Log Viewer - good tool for reading IIS logs

SQL basic checks:
I/O, CPU, Memory on the base database machine/s
MaxDop = 1
Initital mdf sizing and ldf sizing
ldf on fast disk, mdf of content db's on slowest disk (or just put it all on fast disk)
Backups

Maybe Reminders:
Remove all certificate files that are not needed (*.cer & *.pfx)
Ensure local account user name/passwords are changed & secure (I have a local admin account on my Windows template used to create all my VM's ensure this account is disabled or secured).

More Info:
http://nikpatel.net/2012/03/11/checklist-for-designing-and-implementing-sharepoint-2010-extranets-things-to-consider/
https://habaneroconsulting.com/insights/Do-you-need-a-SharePoint-infrastructure-audit
http://blog.muhimbi.com/2009/05/managing-sharepoints-audit.html
http://www.portalint.com/thoughts-on-sharepoint-audit/