how diagnostic logs and usage health data collection logs useful for any issue occur in a sharepoint farm?

Question

what is the difference between diagnostic logs and usage health data collection service usage logs and why sharepoint need to store this in log database?

how these two logs useful for any issue occur in a sharepoint farm?

Answer 1

What is the difference between diagnostic logs and usage health data collection service usage logs ?

Diagnostic logging : is used to troubleshoot the SharePoint farm environment.

In Central Administration, you can use the Diagnostic logging to configure the below settings:

• Event Throttling: Use these settings to control the severity of events captured in the Windows event log and the trace logs. As the severity decreases, the number of events logged will increase.
• Enable Event Log Flood Protection: Enabling this setting allows detection of repeating events in the Windows event log. When the same event is being logged repeatedly, the repeating events are detected and suppressed until conditions return to normal.
• ULS Logs (also known as Trace Logs): set the maximum number of days, the trace log location.

Note: the Trace log location must exist on all servers in the farm.

For more details check Configure diagnostic logging in SharePoint 2013

Usage and health data collection : To monitor the health of SharePoint farm and show How SharePoint is used?

The usage and health data might consist of

• Web Part use.
• SQL IO Usage.
• Event log data.
• Timer service data.
• Metrics for site collections and sites.
• Search usage data, or various performance aspects of the Web servers.

For more details check Configure usage and health data collection in SharePoint 2013

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Why SharePoint need to store this in log database?

As you can see, You have to go to different places to find related Event logs, ULS logs ...etc that are not stored in one single place.

So storing logs in SharePoint_Logging database will be serviceable to view and customize various monitoring information in one place.

The logging database stores various monitoring information that helps you efficiently monitor SharePoint servers and services. More importantly, you can create your own reports for unique monitoring, reporting and troubleshooting requirement based on tables inside the logging database. For more details check View data in the logging database in SharePoint 2013.

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How these two logs useful for any issue occur in a SharePoint farm?

As we mentioned above, the Sharepoint logs help us to troubleshoot and monitor the overall health status of the SharePoint environment.

So if anything goes wrong or you face strange behavior, the first step that you should do is checking and analyze the available logs,

• Based on your error and the correlation ID you can use ULS Viewer to trace the error details that stored in Diagnostic Logs.
• You can also check Windows Event Viewer.
• Also from Central Administration, you can check the Health reports that use the usage data to analyze various aspects of sites and site collections.

After that, you should identify the root cause, take appropriate actions to resolve your issue.

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See also

• Overview of monitoring in SharePoint 2013
• ULS Viewer