what is the best way to do SharePoint 2013/2016 Monitoring?

Question

this is going to be the first time for me to really install SharePoint for production and I would like to gather some information regarding the SP Monitoring.

So, my questions are:

1. Is OOTB SharePoint Monitoring good enough and does it alert administrator if there is a problem, for example, with Security, performance, etc?
2. Does it provide a dashboard where we can see the health of the server?
3. if not, can I use some free tools to do monitoring and what tools are the best and free?

Answer 1

I been many years in the SharePoint and I dont think the with OOTB option you can actively monitor the envirnoment. You will nto get alerts. What you can do daily baises as an habit.

• Monitor the Health Reports from Central admin
• Check the History of timer Jobs
• Check the Event Logs on the SharePoint Server
• Randomly Check the ULS logs.
• Check the SQL server for Disk space
• Check the SharePoint Server Usages(CPU,RAM etc)

I would recomend to use the System Center Operation manager, as it will send you the alerts when it sees something.System Center

Here is the free tool( i am not sure how much it give you but better than nothing) Free SharePoint Monitoring Tool

Also keep this tool to easily going through the ULS logs. Uls Viewer

Also check this one Monitoring scenarios in SharePoint

Lastly some good paid tools.

Answer 2

1. Yes the built in monitoring has a lot to offer: More info: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681489.aspx and https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748636.aspx
2. Yes/No. Central Admin > Monitoring > (review problems and solutions) gives you information about how SharePoint is doing on the servers. Some of the items may be related to the servers. For server related issues our organization uses the SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) console. More info: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205987(v=sc.12).aspx

Answer 3

disclaimer: I work for the company behind the product.

You can try the SysKit Insights, the product is FREE for single server SharePoint farms.

What we wanted to build is monitoring product for the SharePoint admins that is plug and play, so what you need to do is point it to the server and it will auto setupo it self and it will monitor only SharePoint important stuff. We got a lot of complaints that people are using in house SCOM because they already have it, but they cannot extract anything interesting from the SCOM because it is too complicated or it has too much of the noise, not to mention setting up SCOM :-)

You can do the following stuff with it OOTB:

• Monitor the avaibility of Central admin
• Monitor the avaibility of desired site collection
• Monitor and quickly search Event Logs of the server
• Monitor and quickly search SQL Logs of the server
• Monitor and quickly search trace logs (ULS) of the server (we have built our own engine that has lighting fast search for large number of ULS events, also works for sql and server events)
• Check CPU,RAM, disk, network performance
• Alert you when any of the components is over threshold
• Tool is agent less so you don't need to deploy it on the SP farm
• Everything is centralized so if you have multiple farms, or single SP farm with a lot of servers everything is available in one console

Ping me directly for the free license :-)