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Getting Started with the SharePoint On-Demand Assessment

The SharePoint assessment provides you with an assessment of your SharePoint Server farm to diagnose potential issues with the following SharePoint environments:

  • SharePoint hosted on-premise
  • SharePoint hosted on Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The service supports a single SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2019 farm, with up to 30 servers (including SQL Servers) and up to 50,000 webs running on Windows Server 2012 R2 or later.

The recommendations cover areas such as change control, monitoring, disaster recovery, service level agreements, configuration items and the proper function of the major components that make up SharePoint, such as SharePoint configuration settings, dependencies on SQL and IIS, and so on.

This assessment is designed to provide you with specific actionable guidance grouped in Focus Areas to mitigate risks to your SharePoint Server farm and your organization.

SharePoint Assessment Focus Points

The SharePoint Assessment focuses on several key pillars, including:

  • SharePoint Configuration
  • SharePoint Topology
  • SharePoint Health Analyzer
  • SharePoint Data Integrity
  • Event Log Analysis
  • Operational Excellence

Running the SharePoint Assessment

Prerequisites

To take full advantage of the On-Demand Assessments available through Services Hub, you must:

  1. Have linked an active Azure Subscription to Services Hub and added the SharePoint Assessment. For more information, please see: Assessment Setup Guide or watch the how to link video.

  2. A domain account (User or Managed Service Account) with the following rights:

    a. Farm Administrator. b. Local Admin rights on All SharePoint & SQL Servers associated with the SharePoint farm being assessed. c. Sysadmin rights on all Instances housing SharePoint databases. d. Log on as a batch job privileges on the data collection machine.

  3. For detailed technical documentation of the SharePoint Assessment and the server preparation needed to run the assessment. Follow the one of these guides based upon your Assessment choice.

    1. Prerequisites document for the SharePoint Assessment.
    2. Offline Assessments for SharePoint Server

Note

On average, it takes an hour to initially configure your environment to run an On-Demand Assessment. After you run an assessment, you can review the data in Azure Log Analytics. This will provide you with a prioritized list of recommendations, categorized across six focus areas. This allows you and your team to quickly understand risk levels, the health of your environments, act to decrease risk, and improve your overall IT health.

Setup the SharePoint Assessment on a member of the SharePoint farm being assessed

Note

You will only be able to successfully setup the assessment once you have linked your Azure Subscription to Services Hub and added the SharePoint Assessment from Health -> Assessments in Services Hub.

  1. On the data collection machine, create the following folder: C:\LogAnalytics\SharePoint (or any other folder besides C:\ODA which is reserved by the system).

  2. Open regular PowerShell (not ISE) in Administrator mode and run the following cmdlet:

    Add-SharePointAssessmentTask - ServerName <TargetServer> –WorkingDirectory <Directory> -SharePointUsername
<Assessment Account Username> -SharePointPassword <Assessment Account Password>
-ScheduledTaskUsername <Assessment Account Username> -ScheduledTaskPassword <Assessment Account Password> -LogAnalyticsWorkspaceId <WorkspaceId>

Note

<Directory> is the path to an existing directory used to store the files created while collecting and analyzing the data from the environment.

<TargetServer> is a server from the farm being assessed.

<Assessment Account> is a domain account with the permissions defined prior.

<WorkspaceID> provide id for the Log Analytics workspace that will be used to store the uploaded data.

  1. Provide the required user account credentials that satisfy the requirements mentioned in this article earlier.

  2. Data collection is triggered by the scheduled task named SharePointAssessment within an hour of running the previous script and then every 7 days. The task can be modified to run on a different date/time or even forced to run immediately from the task scheduler library -> Microsoft -> Operations Management Suite -> AOI*** -> Assessments -> SharePointAssessment.

  3. During collection and analysis, data is temporarily stored under the Working Directory folder that was configured during setup.

  4. After a few hours, your assessment results will be available on your Log Analytics and Services Hub Dashboard. You can navigate to see the results by going into Services Hub -> IT Health -> On-Demand Assessments and then selecting "View all recommendations" against the active assessment.

  5. If you wish to get a Microsoft Accredited Engineer to go over the issues about your SharePoint Environment with you, you can contact your Microsoft Representative and ask them about the Remote or Onsite CSA Led Delivery.

agreement Remote Engineer Onsite Engineer
Premier SharePoint Server Remote Datasheet SharePoint Server Onsite Datasheet
Unified SharePoint Server Remote Datasheet SharePoint Server Onsite Datasheet