TFS Operation and Problem Management
One of the more painful sides of TFS has been the experience around installation, operations and problem management. The product group is more then aware of this fact and we will be changing this experience with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas). This is a high priority focus we have for the release.
Operations:
Besides changes in the product and installation, that will happen with VS 2008 we have always struggled around lack of information and wide distributed information on ZFS operation. This is now addresses through the just released Operations Guidance for TFS. In there you find a consolidated version of all operations topics:
- e.g where is configuration information stored
- Wide range of information on handling TFS and related (WSS+Reporting Services) rights
- Backup and maintenance strategy and details:
- Always combined with recommendations out of best practice experiences
Be sure to have this guide in place, when you are responsible for TFS operations! All together about 16 pages full of important information and further links.
Problem Management:
A second real tricky part comes up when you have problems with your current installation. Other products have established "Best Practice Analyzer Tools". I am really glad that we also offer this for TFS in our newest power tools release.
Be sure to have the power shell installed beforehand, the error message missing this is not too
clear :-)
The Best practice analyzer enables a full check on your TFS and is able to discover most of the known issues and problem fields. It also coverers the analysis of the pre-install requirements. Insufficient coverage of preinstall requirements is a common problem on TFS installation failures.
After running the analyzer the resulting report really shows these topics and gives clear help on how to solve the problem:
Go into details:
And here you see the related help:
Additionally you can export scan runs and reload scan reports that have been run before, print reports and search in the scan results.
"Oh my has this tool been a big help. It's no secret that TFS configuration can be complicated and diagnosing when it has gone wrong requires some expertise. Well, we've finally delivered that expertise in the form of the TFS Best Practices Analyzer. This tool runs against your system and analyzes everything we've thought to look for so far and tells you when your system is not configured correctly (and why). We've been using this tool on support cases for the last few months and it has dramatically reduced the time necessary to figure out what's wrong with TFS. Now we're delivering this tool as a Power Tool for all to use."