The real power of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is that they can be endlessly customized to meet a wide variety of business needs. The Protean nature of SharePoint is at once its most powerful feature and its most formidable; the complexity of your SharePoint environment can increase by orders of magnitude when you begin to shape it to suit your needs. This complexity can make troubleshooting SharePoint issues a daunting task, as many different data points from different sources must be correlated and analyzed.

The SharePoint Diagnostics (SPDiag) tool greatly simplifies the process of gathering and analyzing troubleshooting data, and can significantly reduce the time needed to diagnose issues. SPDiag provides administrators with a unified interface for troubleshooting SharePoint performance issues, and saves collected data and reports to a SQL Server database.

With SPDiag, you can:

  • Collect IIS and ULS log files, performance counter data, event logs, and WMI instrumentation data from a SharePoint farm.
  • Filter data to show granular information related to specific servers, Web applications, HTTP requests, event IDs, URI queries, and almost any other data points captured through supported channels.
  • Create custom reports that can help reveal performance trends over time.
  • Create snapshots of your SharePoint farm that include detailed information about your farm’s hardware, installed software and logical topology.
  • Export collected data and reports that can be sent to Microsoft support personnel.

SPDiag is included in the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0, available for download at the following locations:

Documentation for SPDiag is available from those download pages as well.