Warning to SharePoint Administrators: Don’t Ignore the Red Health Bar

 

It’s already becoming commonplace.  The red bar at the top of the central administration is quickly becoming a part of what you expect to see when you login to CA.  I’m telling you now… that feature was designed to give you a heads up on issues and problems relating to the health of your farm… Already you’re ignoring it. Don’t deny it. Stop it!

First off “view these issues…”

One by one go through these issues and evaluate the criticality, but fix and clean it up…

1. Do you care?  If no, then edit the rule and uncheck enabled. You may need to reanalyze in some cases.  Take for instance your accounts.  Maybe you are using built-in for some of your services.  If you have decided that’s how you’re going to run things, then make the health rules reflect what you know and plan.  Obviously some of these are best practices and you should take them seriously, but after you’ve decided one way or another, it’s time to clean up the health so you can be notified when there are issues, and you don’t simply ignore the red bar.

2. Maybe you do care, but the frequency is too often, so change it from Daily to Weekly and so on.  I am a fan of onDemand for rules that I may check periodically on my own review schedule.

3. If the rule is tough to understand you can edit the title, maybe add why it is critical, and even change the status level of rules you care about.

4. Haven’t fixed it, but plan to? Add it into your tasks and get it fixed, but don’t live with the red bar.  You’ll learn to ignore important issues!!!