Force Health Care

Want to quickly find and fix potential problems across all of the servers in your farm? Then dont forget to take a look at SharePoint Health Analyzer. SharePoint Health Analyzer is a feature in SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 that allows administrators to schedule regular, automatic checks for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems in the server farm. Any errors that SharePoint Health Analyzer finds are identified in status reports that are made available to farm administrators in Central Administration. Status reports that are produced by SharePoint Health Analyzer explain each issue, list the servers where the problem exists, and outline the steps that an administrator can take to treat the problem. In some cases, errors are repaired automatically as soon as they are found, and farm administrators are informed of the repairs.
The Health analyzer in SharePoint Server 2010 has a swath of rule definitions that it monitors. It raises a warning if a performance indicator exceeds the limits set by the rules.
1. Title: It seems that Microsoft has provided useful and informative names for the default rules.
2. Scope: This field has two options: All Servers and Any Server. This is useful in a farm environment. It allows you to choose if the rule needs to be run on every SharePoint server in a farm, or on just one server. Youll probably want to run computer-specific rules on all servers, but just run SharePoint-specific rules on any server (to reduce performance impact).
3. Schedule: Each rule can be scheduled to execute hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or OnDemandOnly (manual).
4. Enabled: This checkbox allows you to temporarily disable a rule without deleting its definition. I wouldnt delete any existing rules; just disable them instead.
5. Repair Automatically: You can ask SharePoint to automatically try to repair an error.
6. Version: It seems that you can version your rules. This field is a textbox in the Beta release.
The SharePoint Central Administration home page alerts you when a rules been breached.
Health Reports
When a health rule executes, SharePoint Health Analyzer creates a status report and adds it to the Health Analyzer Reports list in the Monitoring section of Central Administration. The default view of this list displays only items that have failed the most recent health check. You can review the archived reports by clicking Review problems and solutions under Health Analyzer in the Monitoring section of Central Administration.
You can access the Health Reports list programmatically through the static Local property of the SPHealthReportsList class, a subclass of SPList. After you have an instance of the SPHealthReportsList class, you can query the list as you would any SPList object.
Remember that the SharePoint family of products such as SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and associated free SharePoint templates have a lot to offer.