eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by SPWebAppTest

Web Applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm, and are typically the interface through which a user interacts with SharePoint - site collections, lists, and libraries come underneath the web application. A web application is associated with a set of access mappings or URLs which are defined in the SharePoint central management console, then automatically replicated into the IIS configuration of every server configured in the farm. WAs are typically independent of each other, have their own application pools, and can be restarted independently in Internet Information Services. Web Applications provide the ability to isolate content, processes, features and users. For example, you can separate the content anonymous users can see vs. what authenticated users can see by hosting the same content in different web apps.

A web application can grow in size over time! If this growth is not kept under control, then you may end up with a situation where a few web applications are hogging the storage resources provided by the Sharepoint environment, leaving the other web applications with limited to no resources! To avoid this, administrators need to be able to quickly isolate the web applications that are growing rapidly, understand their composition, and isolate the reasons for the abnormal growth. The SPWebAppTest test helps administrators with this!

For each web application deployed on a Sharepoint server, this test monitors the current size of that web application and captures a consistent increase in the size of the same, thus pointing you to those web applications that are growing in size at a steady pace and the content databases they are using. In addition, the test also leads you to the probable reasons for the abnormal size of the web application - is it because the web application is handling documents of huge sizes? or is it because the web application is storing too many versions of a document, which is in fact adding to its size? Or is it owing to the numerous sites, site collections, and document libraries that are being hosted by that web application?

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Webapp_size Indicates the current size of this web application. GB  
Webapp_growth_rate Indicates the percentage growth in the size of this web application since the last measurement period. Percent Compare the value of this measure across web applications to know which web application has grown the maximum since the previous measurement period.

By closely tracking the variations in this measure for that web application over time, you can determine whether/not the web application is growing rapidly in size! If so, it is a cause for concern, as it indicates that that web application has the potential of consuming all available storage resources!

In such a situation, you may want to reset the size limit for the site collections that are within the web application, so as to curb its growth.

A site collection can be as large as the content database size limit for the applicable usage scenario.

For more information about the different content database size limits for specific usage scenarios, see the Content database limits discussed in the Interpretation column of the ContentDB_size measure of the SPContentDBTest test.

In general, Microsoft strongly recommends limiting the size of site collections to 100 GB for the following reasons:

  • Certain site collection actions, such as site collection backup/restore, cause large SQL Server operations which can affect performance or fail if other site collections are active in the same database.
  • SharePoint site collection backup and restore is only supported for a maximum site collection size of 100 GB. For larger site collections, the complete content database must be backed up. If multiple site collections larger than 100 GB are contained in a single content database, backup and restore operations can take a long time and are at risk of failure.
User_count Indicates the number of users in this web application. Number Compare the value of this measure across web applications to identify that application which has the maximum number of users.
ContentDB_count Indicates the number of content databases that were used by this web application. Number  
SiteCollections_count Indicates the number of site collections in this web application. Number The maximum recommended number of site collections per farm is: Personal Sites - 500,000, Other site templates - 250,000. The Sites can all reside on one web application, or can be distributed across multiple web applications.

Compare the value of this measure across web applications to know which application consists of the maximum number of site collections. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of site collections has anything to do with the increase in web application size.

Site_count Indicates the total number of sites in the site collections that are part of this web application. Number Microsoft recommends the creation of a maximum of 250,000 sites and subsites per site collection.

You can create a very large total number of web sites by nesting subsites. For example, in a shallow hierarchy with 100 sites, each with 1,000 subsites, you would have a total of 100,000 web sites.

Compare the value of this measure across web applications to know which application consists of the maximum number of sites. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of sites has anything to do with the increase in web application size.
Documentlib_count Indicates the number of document libraries in this web application. Number Document libraries are collections of files that you can share with team members on a Web based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.

By comparing the value of this measure across web applications, you can figure out which web application has the maximum number of document libraries. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of document libraries has anything to do with the increase in web application size.
List_count Indicates the number of lists in this web application. Number A list in SharePoint is used to store data across columns in separate rows. By comparing the value of this measure across web applications, you can figure out which web application has the maximum number of Sharepoint lists. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of lists has in any way impacted the web application size.
Attachment_count Indicates the number of attachments in this web application. Number By comparing the value of this measure across web applications, you can figure out which web application has the maximum number of attachments. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of attachments has in any way impacted the web application size.
Document_count Indicates the total number of documents in this web application. Number By comparing the value of this measure across web applications, you can figure out which web application has the maximum number of documents. In the event of a sudden increase in the size of a web application, you can check how the value of this measure has grown over the same period to figure out whether/not the addition of documents has in any way impacted the web application size.
Document_size Indicates the total size of all documents that are available in this web application. GB Compare the value of this measure across web applications to identify that application with the maximum document size. This can be attributed to the existence of one/more large-sized documents or many moderately sized documents in the web application. If that web application appears to be growing in size rapidly, you may want to keep an eye on this measure to figure out if it is owing to the increase in document size.
Document_version Indicates the number of document versions in this web application. Number Typically, Sharepoint can support a maximum of 40,000 major versions and 511 minor versions of documents. If this limit is exceeded basic file operations-such as file open or save, delete, and viewing the version history- may not succeed.
Avg_docs_per_doclib Indicates the average number of documents per library in this web application. Number