What the general health checks to be performed Pre and Post patching the SharePoint servers?

Question

What the general health checks to be performed Pre and Post patching the SharePoint servers for SP 2013?

Are there any recommended best practices?

Answer 1

I can share some steps from my experience.

Pre-Testing

• I will execute the functional test case (SharePoint functionality) in the farm to get the information whats working and whats not. May be fix the issue before CU.
• Check the Upgrade status of SharePoint server from Central admin.
• Review the Event log and ULS logs, to check if their is any issue being reported. App pool crashing(event log will tell) or timer service etc.
• Check the connectivity with SQL, if using the Always on. perform an on demand failover to make sure SharePoint responding.
• Off course, documents the farm setting (# of DBs, Sites, Web apps, etc)
• Perfom a full backup of your farm( depend upon your company's method...DB backup or SharePoint backup)
• Check the Password expiry date of your service accounts.You dont want to deal with password expiry while upgrading the farm.
• Schedule a down time and communicate with your Team.
• Please make sure Test it lower farm and create process for Production and follow it.

All above test will tell you the actual picture of your farm.

Post-Upgrade

• Make Sure all content database status should be no action required.
• All servers status show no action required.
• Test the Web Application url, Check App pools on all servers.
• Test your service application
• Review Event log and ULS logs for any new entry
• Perform the same functional test cases which you did in pre.
• Once everything is up and running, Now perform full backup of your farm.

Answer 2

Things I check before upgrading to a newer patch:

• Central Admin: Manage servers in this farm will tell you if a server needs to be upgraded. It may be that you are out of sync in in your patching levels, and Servers in farm page will tell you that. It also tells you the config database version, which is useful when selecting the correct patch.
• Central Admin: Check product and patch installation status, will give you the patching history success and failure. It also provides you with a very useful PowerShell script if you don't want to run the GUI version of Product Configuration Wizard.
• And if this is a new farm, I always run Product Configuration Wizard (PSConfig) on every server to make sure everything is OK before I start installing patches.
• Last, don't forget to download both the English version and any additional languages you have available in your farm.

Post patching, after running Product Configuration Wizard I check Central Admin: Check product and patch installation status, and that all web applications can be accessed from a client machine.