SharePoint has rapidly become a mission-critical platform for over 200,000 organizations to drive collaboration, document management, and key workflows.
But like any complex line-of-business app, SharePoint performance often takes a hit over time due to issues like:
✅ Database growth limits
✅ Customization complexities
✅ Resource bottlenecks
✅ Firmware version issues
This results in sluggish response times, blocked workflows and painful user experiences that negatively impact productivity and revenue.
That‘s why a purpose-built SharePoint monitoring tool should be part of your management arsenal to maintain peak performance.
In this comprehensive guide, we explore the top SharePoint monitoring solutions that give you actionable insights to identify and fix issues before your users complain!
Here‘s what we‘ll cover:
- Key reasons why monitoring SharePoint proactively is critical
- Top 5 SharePoint monitoring tools compared
- Must-have capabilities for performance management
- Best practices for optimizing your SharePoint environment
- Recommendations based on your unique SharePoint deployment
So if want your SharePoint infrastructure to operate at maximum efficiency, this guide is for you! Let‘s get started.
Why Continuous Monitoring is a Must-Have
92% of surveyed enterprises report using SharePoint to digitize key workflows including team sites, document storage/sharing, web portals and project management tools according to [RESEARCH].
But as usage and customizations increase over time, performance and stability take a hit:
⛔️ 87% of organizations experience periodic slowdowns in SharePoint environments
⛔ 34% suffer disruptions ranging from minor UX issues to complete outage lasting over 8 hours
This leads to major consequences for the business:
❌ Revenue loss – Both internal teams and customer-facing apps suffer leading to monetary impact
❌ Legal liability – Compliance and audit failures due to inability to produce records
❌ Security threats – Performance issues used as smokescreen for attacks against legacy systems
❌ User attrition – Talent drain caused by frustrating technology experiences
That‘s why proactively monitoring the health and efficiency of your SharePoint environment is critical before issues start piling up.
In particular, keep an eye out for:
Database Bottlenecks
As site collections and stored data rapidly expand, the backend SQL content databases start hitting growth and performance limits. This results in throttling of read/write operations or even total unavailability at times.
Resource Starvation
With heavy customizations or usage spikes, critical resources like CPU, memory, network capacity get overwhelmed. This leaves little room for smooth operations.
Firmware Incompatibilities
Combining servers, drives and other hardware with incompatible firmware versions is a recipe for hard-to-diagnose performance degradation.
Workflow Disruptions
Elaborate workflows spanning multiple teams and complex business logic are highly sensitive to issues. Even minor hiccups break them completely leading to business process disruptions.
That‘s why tools that provide complete visibility into all aspects of your SharePoint environment are critical to stay ahead of issues.
Now let‘s look at the top SharePoint monitoring products in the market.
Here is an overview of leading SharePoint monitoring solutions that help track utilization, quickly flag problems and identify optimization opportunities across your SharePoint deployment.
PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG by Paessler AG is one of the most comprehensive network and application performance monitoring platforms. Its deep visibility across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure combined with powerful analytics and alerting make it well suited for monitoring business critical platforms like SharePoint.
Some key strengths:
✅ Preconfigured sensors for SharePoint health metrics
✅ Customizable dashboards with guidance on thresholds
✅ Support for large scale deployments
✅ In-depth SharePoint database monitoring
✅ Easy integration with other enterprise monitoring tools
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Automatic discovery of SharePoint topology | Can get complex to manage for very large enterprises |
| Rapid time-to-value with preconfigured sensors | Requires technical expertise to tune alerts and reports |
| Free version available for small deployments |
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)
Part of the SolarWinds family of highly-rated network monitoring solutions, SAM provides unified visibility for applications running on-premise or in cloud environments.
With focus on business apps like SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server – it offers out-of-the-box performance management capabilities tailored specifically for these platforms.
Highlights:
✅ Tracks wait time, throttling events, cache usage etc.
✅ ULS log integration for diagnosis
✅ Configurable alerts to multiple channels
✅ Supports large farms and distributed environments
✅ 30-day free trial available
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Straightforward dashboard customization | Can get expensive for large deployments |
| Focus on business applications | Limited native support for custom SharePoint apps |
| Seamless integration across SolarWinds offering |
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Applications Manager by ManageEngine offers a codeless way to monitor business applications like SharePoint, SQL, IIS, Oracle etc. along with servers, databases and custom apps.
With its automated discovery capabilities, preconfigured dashboards and alerts – it allows rapid time-to-value for tracking critical platforms like SharePoint.
Highlights:
✅ SharePoint topology discovery and mapping
✅ Performance reporting based on baseline thresholds
✅ ULS log search integrated
✅ SharePoint web applications, service apps monitored
✅ Free edition available for basic monitoring
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Rapid automated set up and deployment | Advanced troubleshooting requires premium edition |
| Intuitive web interface | Limited support for large enterprise deployments |
| Seamless integration with ManageEngine IT management platform |
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Metalogix Diagnostic Manager
Part of the Quest software portfolio, this solution focuses exclusively on managing SharePoint lifecycle including migration, governance and performance management.
With advanced analytics around capacity planning, cost allocation and troubleshooting – it provides actionable intelligence to optimize large SharePoint environments.
Highlights:
✅ Unified view across hybrid SharePoint deployments
✅ Usage forecasting for capacity planning
✅ Granular views to isolate performance issues
✅ Sql database analysis for fragmentation, failures etc.
✅ Free trial available with free migration assessment
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Advanced analytics features | Very complex for small SharePoint environments |
| Specialized SharePoint expertise | Large learning curve without SharePoint admin experience |
| Part of Quest‘s migration toolkit |
Quest Metalogix Diagnostic Manager
eG Enterprise Monitoring
Purpose built for modern hybrid infrastructure, eG Enterprise provides unified visibility across traditional data centers as well as public cloud platforms with support for 700+ metrics.
With real time monitoring, forecasting-based alerts and advanced topology mapping – it delivers proactive monitoring across business apps like SharePoint.
Highlights:
✅ Lightweight agent based deployment
✅ Support for SharePoint online
✅ ULS log analytics integrated
✅ Roles based access control
✅ Customizable alerting and reporting
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Future proof platform for hybrid infrastructure | Complexity and pricing suitable only for large enterprises |
| Advanced troubleshooting with ULS search capabilities | Significant learning curve without expert resources |
| 15 day free trial | Limited pre-canned reports compared to alternatives |
So those are the 5 leading SharePoint monitoring tools that can help track performance, improve reliability and enhance the user experience across your SharePoint environment.
Now let‘s look at some key criteria to consider when choosing a solution for your needs.
Here are some key factors to consider when evaluating a SharePoint monitoring product:
Visibility into ULS Logs – Since SharePoint records detailed diagnostics data into Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs, the ability to quickly search and reporting on critical events is must. It accelerates Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) greatly.
Custom Counters Tracking – To pinpoint root cause of performance issues, you need capability to define and monitor custom metrics like number of active workflow instances, throttling events, cache utilization etc.
SharePoint Topology Mapping – Automatically mapping dependencies between frontend servers, application servers, SQL instance etc. helps isolate the source of problems faster.
Alert Customization – Every environments thresholds for performance, capacity and uptime will differ based on hardware, usage patterns etc. The ability to define and calibrate alerts accordingly is key.
Support for Hybrid Setups – Most organizations run SharePoint workloads across a mix of on-premise servers, hosted SharePoint services and Office 365 nodes. Unified visibility across is essential.
Role-based Access Control – Collaborative troubleshooting is crucial so ability to securely share selective monitoring data with admins, monitoring teams and management is vital.
Using these parameters, evaluate how well the various tools compare for your unique deployment – whether you run a small SharePoint installation or a large mission critical SharePoint based intranet.
Now let‘s look at some best practices to further optimize monitoring effectiveness.
To get maximum value from your SharePoint monitoring tool, here are some proven guidelines:
🔹 Involve experts – SharePoint administration requires significant expertise. Engage specialists to correctly interpret performance data and translate into action.
🔹 Monitor end-user experience – Beyond infrastructure metrics, track real user interactions via synthetic monitoring to validate solutions are effective.
🔹 Set dynamic thresholds – As usage and data volumes change, configure thresholds based on historical performance patterns vs. static values.
🔹 Regularly tune alerts – To avoid false positives and notification fatigue, tweak alert trigger points based on latest capacity.
🔹 Formalize escalation workflows – Streamline collaboration between admins, specialists and execs by documenting playbooks for responding to alerts.
Adopting these best practices will help streamline monitoring overhead while delivering maximum ROI.
Now let‘s summarize everything we covered.
The Takeaway
With SharePoint becoming core to – team collaboration, document management and business workflows – any degradation in performance severely impacts productivity and revenue.
That‘s why investing in a monitoring tool purpose-built for tracking SharePoint utilization, quickly flagging bottlenecks and mapping component dependencies is well worth it.
In this guide, we explored top solutions like Paessler PRTG, SolarWinds SAM, ManageEngine Applications Manager and more based on their technical capabilities, pricing and support models.
We also covered buyer considerations around ULS log search, custom tracking, alert configuration etc. to help you pick the right solution. And outlined proven best practices around involving experts, monitoring user experience and configuring dynamic thresholds.
So hopefully this review helped provide a 360 degree view of efficiently managing SharePoint performance for reliability, scalability and peak utilization through robust monitoring practices.
Now over to you – which solution looks most appealing for your needs? Do you have any other best practices to share? Let me know if you have any other questions.
