Monday 21 September 2015

Get the slowest request in SharePoint - The PowerShell script

In April this year I published a post called "Query Usage and Health Data collection database for slow requests execution". In this post I have explained the limitations of the "Slowest Pages" report page in SharePoint and provided a SQL query script that can overcome this limitations and you can receive a valuable information about the requests logged in the Usage and Health database.
After I created this script I have used it in multiple occasions and it turned out to be extremely useful! However, there is one big disadvantage(in my opinion) about this script, it is T-SQL script.
This is why I started to think how I can transform it into a PowerShell script, so I will not need to know which is the logging database, on which server it is, go to SSMS, copy to CSV and so on.
Now I might be wrong, but there is no SharePoint API that will help me to get such result in PowerShell. I also did some googling on the subject and I was unable to find anything remotely to what I was looking for, maybe there is some chance to get something like this in SharePoint 2010 where we have Web Analytics Service application.
If I am correct, this can be an idea for improvement in the SharePoint web analytics field, something that I think was announced to be better in SharePoint Server 2016.Usage and Health database captures a lot of useful information and it is a shame that SharePoint Admins cannot take advantage of it without being SQL master or BI guru. My solution was just to embed the SQL query in the script. 
In the script I put some sweet stuff like: Support for SQL Authentication, The output can be in PowerShell with type System.Data.DataRow and in CSV file/Grid View, you can pass the Start and End times as DateTime objects and many more.
If you run the script from SharePoint server the script will automatically determine the SQL server, the Usage and Health database, will do the connection to the SQL Server by impersonating the identity of the user that is running the script and you can filter by web application by passing Url,GUID or WebApplication object.
Of course you can successfully run the script when you are not on SharePoint or SQL server, you will just need to enter more parameters, use GUID for Web Application and have connectivity to the SQL server itself.
I have successfully tested the script with SharePoint 2010/SQL 2012, SharePoint 2013/SQL 2012 and SharePoint 2016 TP/SQL 2014. You can check the output and download the script below, if you have issues read the Help section, ask a question in the Q&A section in Technet Gallery and if you like it Rate it.
Finally I would like to have a minute for shameless self-promotion and say that last week I passed 3000 downloads mark in the Gallery and I received a Gold medal for my Gallery contributions. Thank you!

SharePoint Slow Request Grid View Output


 Download the script from: TechNet Gallery
(You may experience issue with Chrome, use Firefox/IE to open the link)

No comments:

Post a Comment