eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by SPOSiteTest

SharePoint Site Collection, just as the name implies, is a collection of SharePoint Sites. Each site collection contains a single top-level site and subsites below it. Each site collection has its unique site columns (metadata), navigation, permissions (security groups), site templates, branding, etc.

Typically, server resources such as CPU and RAM are allocated to an Office 365 tenant as a whole based on the number of user licenses; these resources are then shared by all site collections in the tenant. This means that there is the danger of a single site collection exhausting the resources across the tenancy. To avoid this, organizations that have customized site collections or sandboxed solutions use resource quotas. By applying resource quotas to specific collections, administrators can ensure that custom code running in specific site collections does not deplete all server resources assigned to the tenancy.

Like CPU and RAM, storage resources are also allocated to a tenant based on the number of user licenses associated with that tenancy. This storage can then be allocated to the site collections in one of the following ways:

  • Automatically, using pooled storage

  • Manually, by explicitly configuring storage allocations on a per-site collection basis

The pooled storage model allows SharePoint Online to manage storage automatically rather than storage management being a task performed manually by an administrator. Site collections automatically draw the storage resources from the pool as and when they need it, upto a maximum of 25 TB per collection.

On the other hand, if you prefer to fine tune the storage space allocated to each site collection, you can set your storage management option to “manual” and specify individual site collection storage limits.

Regardless of what resource (whether CPU, memory, or storage) is managed and how it is managed (whether automatically or manually), the goal is to ensure that all site collections have the resources they need at their disposal at all times! A resource contention will not only impact the performance of sites in the collection, but also that of the web applications they support. This is why, it is imperative that administrators track the resource usage of each site collection closely, proactively detect resource contentions, accurately isolate the contentious resource and the site collection that is impacted, and promptly fine-tune the resource allocation, before performance suffers. This is exactly what the SPOSiteTest test does!

This test monitors the status, composition (count of subsites), resource allocations, and resource usage of each site collection, and promptly alerts administrators to inactive collections and those that are consuming resources excessively. This way, the test accurately pinpoints the site collections that may exhaust their resource quota/allocation soon, thereby prompting administrators to rapidly right-size the collections. Additionally, the test also reports whether/not a site collection is locked, with detailed diagnostics revealing the type of lock applied (read-only, no access, etc.). When users complain that they are unable to access their site collection or add content to it, this information will enable administrators to figure out why. The count of external users accessing each site collection and the details of these users are also provided, so that administrators can easily perform security audits on accesses to a site collection.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each site collection.

First-level descriptor: Site collection URL

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Status Indicates the current status of this site collection.   The values that this measure can report and their corresponding numeric values are listed in the table below:

Measure Value Numeric Value
Active 1
Inactive 0

Note:

By default, this measure reports the Measure Values in the table above to indicate the status of a site collection. In the graph of this measure however, the same is indicated using the numeric equivalents only.
Webs_count Indicates the number of sites in this site collection. Number  
Storage_quota Indicates the maximum storage space allocated to this site collection. GB  
Storage_usage_percent Indicates the percent usage of the storage resources allocated to this collection. Percent If the value of this measure is close to 100%, it implies that the site collection is about to exhaust the allocated storage resources. You may want to allocate more resources to such a collection, in this case, so that the performance of sites in that collection do not deteriorate.
Current_resource_usage Indicates the number of server resources currently utilized by this site collection. Number If the value of this measure is close to the value of the Storage_quota measure for a site collection, it implies that the site collection is consistently over-utilizing its resources and may run out of server resources very shortly. In such a case, you may want to consider fine-tuning the Resource quota of that site collect
Average_resource_usage Indicates the average number of server resources utilized by this site collection. Number If the value of this measure is close to the value of the Storage_quota measure for a site collection, it could imply a sudden spike in resource usage of that collection.
Resource_quota Indicates the server resource quota set for this site collection. Number If the value of the Current resource usage measure is close to the value of this measure for a site collection, it could imply a sudden spike in resource usage.

On the other hand, if the value of the Average_resource_usage measure is close to the value of this measure, it implies that the site collection is consistently over-utilizing its resources and may run out of server resources very shortly. In such a case, you may want to consider fine-tuning the Resource quota of that site collection.
RsQuotaWarningLevel Indicates at what usage level administrators should be warned of a resource contention on this site collection.   You can configure an email to be sent to the primary site collection administrator when the resource utilization reaches a specific percentage of the assigned quota.

If such a warning level is set, this measure will report a percentage value. This means that the primary site collection administrator can expect an email alert if the site collection consumes the configured percentage of its Resource_quota.
Locked Indicates whether/not this site collection is locked.   The values that this measure can report and their corresponding numeric values are listed in the table below:

Measure Value Numeric Value
Yes 1
No 0

Note:

By default, this measure reports the Measure Values in the table above to indicate the lock status of a site collection. In the graph of this measure however, the same is indicated using the numeric equivalents only.

If the value of this measure is Yes, then you can use the detailed diagnosis of this measure to know the type of lock that has been applied on the site collection. The possible options are as follows:

Locking option Description
Adding content prevented Prevents users from adding new content to the site collection. Updates and deletions are still allowed.
Read-only Prevents users from adding, updating, or deleting content. When a user attempts to add, update, or delete content, the user receives an error message that informs the user that access is denied and that the user does not have permission to perform the action or access the resource. A read-only lock can be either site collection administrator controlled if the site collection is archived or farm administrator controlled.
No access Prevents users from accessing the site collection and its content. Users who attempt to access the site receive an error page that informs the user that the website declined to show the webpage.

LastContentModifiedDate Indicates the number of days that has elapsed since the content in this site collection was last modified. Days  
External_users Indicates the number of external users to this site collection. Number Use the detailed diagnosis of this measure to know who are the external users accessing the site collection.