This is a summary of the: Server and Health Monitoring session held by Dan Winter and Umesh Unnikrishnan at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

Are you on the admin side as me? Well then we have some really interesting things to look forward to in 2010. It’s just so much good things that I will not be able to get everything here. But to take 4 of then that was discussed at this session.

ULS Improvements.
They way to handle what is getting logged from Central Admin has been very much improved and with Event Throtteling and Event Flood Protection that basically is a way to say that; I have had this exact same errors during a short amount of time. I will stop logging this now.
You now have the option to set the amount of GB that you logs should be using and not only the, critical events will be sent to the logging database.
Together with the Correlation ID’s and the new ULS Viewer tool that was revealed today (and that will work on 2007 environments as well) you are able to easily find the problems and track them down. You find the ULS Viewer at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

Logging Database
I wrote a bit yesterday about this but the logging database is a new database that will be set up by default where different log entries will end up and by doing so you are able to hook it up to SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) to manage your SharePoint farm. The DB schema is documented so be sure that this will end up in a lot of third-party products to help you monitor the logging database. MS will ship two reports with RTM and that will be: Slowest pages and most frequent users.

Developer dashboard
Feels like I have already covered it in my earlier posts, but what it basically is that it allows admins to get a report on each site on for instance what parts took long time to lead etc. Very useful!

Server Health
Last but not least is the new Server Health page in Central Administration. Here you get a dashboard of the servers in your farm. For instance, among the approx. 100 built in “rules”, for monitoring it might check for accounts used on Web applications, disk space etc. So you can from there see what you need to do and correct it. Best think is that this is extensible so that you can build your own rules and plug in to SharePoint.