Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 19

Troubleshooting SharePoint

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The Unified Logging Service
• The Correlation ID
• The Developer Dashboard
• Additional tools and resources

For a product that provides so many options and functions, SharePoint is remarkably stable. That being said, SharePoint isn’t perfect. Sometimes things don’t work the way you might expect, and sometimes they may not work at all. Even a great administrator won’t know everything about a system as complex as a SharePoint farm, so it is important to understand the basics of getting to the root of SharePoint issues. This chapter demonstrates a wide range of ways in which SharePoint speaks to you about its problems. Before digging into the details, however, remember that your brain is your best troubleshooting tool. Find out as much information about the error as possible before you even touch the server. When does the error occur? Does it happen to everyone, or only to certain users? Does the problem occur only in certain scenarios or does it seem to be random? Finally, not to be forgotten, what was the last thing that changed? Did you just add a patch or install a farm solution? Did all your users just upgrade their browser version? Things that are new or things that were old and eliminated are always good places to start when looking for the cause of a problem. If none of the basics give you an idea of what went wrong, have no fear; there are plenty of other places to look.

THE UNIFIED LOGGING SERVICE

The Unified Logging ...