Today, the SharePoint world got a nice surprise from the firma Acceleratio, the creators of the legendary SPDocKit SharePoint documentation and governance tool. This new free (!!!) tool, SPDocKit Pulse, can run from any computer which is joined to your domain, and it will scan your environment for SharePoint farms. After scanning it, it will create very beautiful and useful dashboards, which will show you the status of all of your SharePoint farms at a glance!
Lot of people which I know have more than one SharePoint farm. Usually, it is the standard Development – Testing – Staging – Production story, but I know folks with more than 50 farms in their environments. In all those farms, different things can go wrong – to name just the disk size, CPU and RAM usage.
And this is where Pulse comes in play.
First, it will offer you to scan your environment. The autodiscovery works actually pretty nice:
Once that has been done, you will immediately get the dashboard with all your farms. Farms are named by the very first server in the farm that has been discovered (since farms have no name), but you can change the farm names very easily. Likewise, it can happen that lone servers – mostly SQL Servers – are found, and cannot be associated with a farm. Again, here, you can associate servers with the farm easily, with one click.
Pulse will try to determine the role of your servers the best it can. But, since Pulse is a client side tool, which you can run from your client machine, it has no access to SharePoint APIs. That means that role detection is at the moment dependent on IIS presence, so it does not function perfectly every time. Basically, it looks if IIS has been installed at the server, and declares the server as WFE if it is. Again, you can change the server role with a single click, but this is generally something that Acceleratio people need to work on. But hey, for a free tool, this is actually great!
You notice different KPI-like colors with each server:
If it is yellow, or red, you will want to drill down to see what is actually going on there. For each server, Pulse will give you its disk, CPU and RAM status, in [almost] real time, and you can easily check what is going wrong there.
On the end
On the end, this is a great little *free* tool, which can be run from the any computer in the domain (not necessary a SharePoint Server), to quickly scan, and get dashboard-like status of your farms. I see Pulse coming to lot of large monitors in server rooms where SharePoint is hosted. Great work, girls and boys from Acceleratio, you have nailed it again!
Get Pulse at:
