One of the major improvements in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to centrally manage your farm health directly from SharePoint Central Administration. The Health Status menu gives you an at-a-glance view of services and issues on the farm as well as a place to fix these issues. Located in the Monitoring section of Central Administration, Health Status runs diagnostics on the system and compiles the results of this into an easily viewed report.
For easier viewing the results of this report are then sorted into categories. The report will include both site and server related issues. Everything from the WFE page file to SQL database corruption is reviewed by the system and then viewable from this screen. Each item that is listed can also be drilled down into for additional information.
Some issues will even display the option for SharePoint to automatically fix the issue or setup alerts if the issue returns. What is also nice is that you can edit these items if you don’t want them showing up in the report.
It appears that this functionality is based off of the SharePoint Best Practice Analyzer and I didn’t find a way that I could add items to the report. I am not sure if custom development would be required but it would be nice if eventually server administrators can make their own reports or even use something like this to manage all of their systems, including Exchange, SQL, OCS, Hyper-V. Then again, let’s not automate everything 🙂
