SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities Fall

November 3, 2012

Everybody Lies Troubleshooting SharePoint

with House M.D.

John L. Ferringer

About me

• Senior Manager, Sogeti

• My blog: http://www.MyCentralAdmin.com

• Twitter: @ferringer

Who is Dr. Gregory House?

• A diagnostician

• An arrogant jerk

• A cynic

• An observer

What’s House got to do with SharePoint?

• We often have to diagnose (troubleshoot)

• Dealing with SharePoint can make you a

jerk

• Dealing with SharePoint will definitely

make you a cynic

• The more you observe, the better you

diagnose

(just kidding)

Does SharePoint make you feel like House?

SharePoint is….

• Complex

• Vast in depth and breadth

• Made up of many subsystems

• Influenced by many outside factors

• Every farm and use case is unique

• …

• Just like the human body

How does House cure his patients?

• Understand the Issue

• Determine the Root Cause

• Finding a Cure

• Move Forward

Why not do the same with SharePoint?

Before we start, let’s keep this in mind…

UNDERSTAND THE ISSUE

Identify the Problem

• You can’t cure anything if you don’t know

what’s wrong

• Interview the patient

• You also have to ask the right questions

– What is the error?

– How is it happening?

– Who is seeing the error?

– When does it occur?

– What else do we know about the error?

SharePoint 2010’s Correlation ID

• Your users may see it

• You may see it

• It’s a GUID

• It is actually helpful

Let’s get REAL for a minute

• SharePoint 2010 farm

• 1 Web Server, 1 App Server, 1 SQL Server

• Visual Studio on the Web Server

Review the Patient History

• What has the patient done to get here?

• What is their environment?

• What happened before the error?

• What was happening during the error?

• How was SharePoint performing?

• Do you have Change Management?

Know Your Logs!

• They record what’s going on

• Which logs?

– Windows Event, ULS, IIS

– Keep in mind other sources: SQL, DCs, etc

• Know your tools!

– ULS Viewer

– Log Parser

– PAL

– Just to name a few

Why do we care about Change?

• You have to know

what you have!

• How has it changed?

• When were they made?

Back to Reality

DETERMINE THE ROOT CAUSE

Rule Out the Obvious

• Understand what you know

• Every problem is unique

• But, someone’s probably seen it before…

• So check your sources:

– Internal

– External: Google it!

• But be careful…

(with Bing!)

Remember…

• Know your sources

– Who wrote it?

– Are they credible?

• Read the entire post!

– Everything!

– All the comments too

• Was there a follow up post?

• Validate the information

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice…

Talk to the team

What Doesn’t Fit?

It’s all about me, right?

• Remember the database errors?

• Here, have some SA rights…

• No thank you.

Get a Different Perspective

In the Real World, who do I turn to?

FINDING A CURE

Review Possible Treatments

• Reproduce the issue

• Test it!

• Understand

the treatment

• Always read the label

Back to John’s problem…

Treatments:

• Sysadmin rights in the database

–Oh heck no!

• Local development environment

– Not possible

• Proper rights in the database

– Now we’re talking…

Fully Understand the Cause

Fully Understand the Remedy

MOVING FORWARD HTTP://TINYURL.COM/SPTROUBLE

Questions…