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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a very popular IT collaboration platform for mission-critical business data. To further facilitate that collaboration more and more companies are building custom applications on top of SharePoint. However, these customizations heavily influence the performance and scalability characteristics of any SharePoint installation. Additionally, SharePoint is mission critical for organizations big and small and thus must scale from a few users to hundreds or even thousands accessing SharePoint applications.

dynaTrace goes beyond generic .NET Performance Management. It enables SharePoint customers to analyze and manage the performance and service-level fulfilment of individual SharePoint sites running inside the same IIS6+ instance across the entire life-cycle, including:

• 24x7 monitoring of individual SharePoint Sites in production, including rapid triage and root-cause analysis of performance and availablity problems
• Rapid root-cause analysis of performance and scalability bottlenecks that occurred during load testing of entire SharePoint sites
• Analyzing the performance and architecture of individual Web Parts running on a local MS Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) or on your Continous Integration Server in conjunction with unit and integration tests during development

Insight into SharePoint

dynaTrace's PurePath Technology provides deep insights into the inner workings of your SharePoint applications, both in standard SharePoint components and in custom WebPart implementations, even without access to source-code. This way you can identify how 3rd party components contribute to your SharePoint installtion's overall performance.

Optimizing WebPart rendering and data access

SharePoint enables developers to implement WebParts in different ways. Depending on the rendering method, content databases may be accessed differently. dynaTrace’s API View let’s you immediately find out if a certain data access strategy fits the WebPart usage scenario. This way, dynaTrace helps you quickly to understand if some of your rendering choices are significantly degrading performance. As dynaTrace helps you understand how the SharePoint Data Access Layer works, you can now also design data-intensive features with performance and scalability in mind, or fix data-driven performance problems that occur in production with ease.

Tuning communication between WebParts

Accessing data provided through SharePoint WebParts is in general often a performance-critical area. With dynaTrace you can easily trace and optimize CAML queries against SharePoint Lists and Views back to their resulting SQL statements. Getting insight into the framework allows tweaking the communication between WebParts to avoid too much communication and database overhead.

Understanding Browser Workloads

Web Clients are only “thin” if the application’s presentation logic follows certain rules. However, SharePoint brings with it many interactive Web application features in form of client-side JavaScript. The overhead of bringing this code to the Browser and of executing this code can easily become an issue. This is why dynaTrace allows you to identify how much data – in particular JavaScript and CSS - the SharePoint server sends to the browser. With this information you can easily identify problems in your GUI layer and optimize the “experienced” end-user performance.

Analyzing Configuration Issues

SharePoint is a dynamic platform that can be configured and customized in many different ways. A small incorrect entry in a SharePoint configuration file, e.g. the main SharePoint web.config, may lead to a severe performance degradation. Using dynaTrace’s event diagnosis capabilities you can easily catch any exception, which allows you to identify the exact location of such configuration issues in minutes.

Insight across Technology Boundaries

SharePoint portals may use backend business logic implemented in Java EE technologies, which may also run on the mainframe. dynaTrace PurePath Technology allows you to follow transactions across these technology boundaries providing an integrated diagnostics view. This way, diagnosing problems in complex heterogeneous environments is as easy as for more uniform applications.