Solving real world SharePoint problems with Opalis

Monitoring Content DB Size and provisioning a new Content DB

By taking the previous example a little farther it would be possible to monitor the content databases of a SharePoint environment to prevent content databases from becoming too large. This is one of the main advantages of Opalis is that it assists in maintaining Best Practices in the enterprise (see Figure 9-49).

Requirements

· Initial Global scheduler to analyze the environment on a daily basis

· PowerShell script that finds all the web application url’s, then finds the content databases that make up the site collections

· Database query that passes in the content database name and returns the size

· Logic that defines the maximum size of the content database

· Logic that calculates 90% and 70% and provides alerts

· PowerShell script that automatically provisions a new content database to the appropriate web application when the database size hits 70%. The content database should initially be offline to prevent use initially.

· At 90% of the defined Best Practice size use a PowerShell script that automatically put the initial content database in offline mode and puts the new database in Ready mode.

Figure 9-49 Policy to monitor content databases in SharePoint.