SharePoint has the ability to heal itself. Pretty cool concept invented by the guys at IBM a long time ago and finally being
worked into Microsoft products. In central administration you will find the 'monitoring' page has some pretty neat things on it:
One of the coolest is the Health Analyzer Rules. By clicking on Review Rule Definitions, we will see several of these:
I have explored several of these jobs and being it is RTM, not all of them are working exactly like they were intended to. One
example is the 'One or more categories are configured with Verbose trace logging.' rule. This rule is designed to check
if anyone has set the logging setting to 'verbose'. If they have, it can automatically fix this condition.
Out of the box, we can see the settings are 'Information' for Event Level and 'Medium' for trace level:
As an unexperieced SharePoint admin, you may end up clicking the "All categories" checkbox and then setting the values to
their highest level 'Verbose":
This is bad as it will generate VERY large log files in a production environment. We are talking
gigabyptes/minute. This is very bad for a virtualized image as the image file will grow very large. Then try backing it
up by copying it…not fun copying a several 100's gigabyte VM file around.
Luckily, the health rule will watch for this condition and when it finds it will give us the nice red or yellow bar at the top of the Central
Administration site. We will also see that the condition has been noted in a rule status list. Clicking on the item, we will
get a definition of what is misconfigured, note the ability to "Repair Automatically":
Unfortunately, the logging health analyzer job needs an update. It is suppose to reset the levels back to the default settings. It does this for the
Trace level setting, but it doesn't touch the event level settings:
These still remain at 'Verbose' after the job runs. The job should also set these
back to 'Information' as per the out of the box settings.