ExtraHop Networks introduced a new monitoring bundle that provides cross-tier visibility for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 environments.

The SharePoint monitoring bundle enables IT teams to proactively monitor and troubleshoot problems without requiring any preconfiguration or invasive agents.

With 180 million people relying on SharePoint collaboration software every day, it has never been more important for IT teams to ensure that the SharePoint environment is running smoothly. Traditional monitoring tools, however, do not provide IT Operations teams with correlated visibility across the entire SharePoint application delivery chain. As a result, when SharePoint users complain about slow performance or downtime, IT Operations teams are left blind to the exact source of the problem.

ExtraHop’s new SharePoint monitoring bundle — available free of charge on the ExtraHop customer forum — solves this problem by tracking and correlating every SharePoint transaction as it passes from the user, to the web server, back and forth between the web server and database, and across the network.

The ExtraHop platform recognizes SharePoint transactions by the globally unique identifier (GUID) that SharePoint attaches to individual transactions. This passive recognize-and-trace method of transaction tracing requires no configuration and is a less expensive and less complex alternative to the tag-and-trace method that requires agents to be installed on systems.

Downloading and implementing the SharePoint monitoring bundle takes just minutes, with immediate benefits:

- Monitor the entire application delivery chain for SharePoint, including the client or browser, web servers, DNS, Active Directory, firewall devices, load balancers, SharePoint servers, Microsoft SQL Server database servers, and storage systems

- Distinguish between transaction latency at the web and database tiers

- Distinguish between network transfer time and server processing time within each tier

- Capture extensive application-level details for each transaction, such as specific errors and the methods used

- Create geographic visualizations of SharePoint activity, including the location of devices generating errors, with the ExtraHop Geomaps and Application Activity Map features

“Social enterprises that rely on SharePoint need to keep those environments up and running with low latency,” said Dennis Callaghan, Senior Enterprise Software Analyst with 451 Research. “ExtraHop’s turnkey SharePoint monitoring bundle delivers a holistic view of the application delivery chain and drills down to the granular transaction details to pinpoint the root cause of problems that can impact the end user’s experience of SharePoint. What makes this offering especially compelling is that it works out of the box and does not require agents to be installed on systems.”

“Our SharePoint monitoring bundle highlights one of the key advantages of the ExtraHop platform, which is its flexibility to meet the varied demands of real-world IT environments,” says Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. “Users create and share monitoring bundles on our forum, and we add some of our own, such as the SharePoint bundle. These bundles are extensible so that users can easily modify and add to them as needed. We’re proving how ExtraHop is an open platform for operational intelligence. We have the technology in place—our documented API, Application Inspection Triggers, rsyslog export, and more — and our user community is making this vision a reality.”

The ExtraHop SharePoint solution bundle is available now on all versions of the ExtraHop platform and users can try it free for 60 days by downloading the ExtraHop Discovery Edition.