SharePoint 2010 Health Analyzer and RSS Feeds

In Central Admin of SharePoint 2010 you are probably familiar with the Health Analyzer. It was around in SharePoint 2007. Now in SharePoint 2010 – you see a ribbon right on the central admin homepage.

So a colleague and I were joking around that why not put an RSS feed in Outlook against the list that stores health errors so you can get automatic notification of when there is a Health Issue.

Guess what, not that bad of an idea. Now I will get notification if one of my rules fail in production. This is not a replacement for SCOM, but just something simple you can do to monitor your SharePoint Health Analyzer rules. Now I know many folks could debate some of the rules but at the end of the day most of them are good best practices you may want to adhere to in a production environment.

Health Analyzer Rules

If you are not familiar with the Health Analyzer rules, they can be managed in Central Admin. Below is screenshot of some of the actual rule definitions.

Here is an actual rule definition. You can see there is a schedule to when the rule is evaluated. Also notice there is a Run Now button which will execute rule manually. You even have the ability to disable rules which do not apply to your governance rules so that they will not continually appear in your RSS feed.