SharePoint 2013: Tweaking the Health Analyzer Rule Definitions

Vignesh Ganesan
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For all those SharePoint Server administrators out there, I’m pretty sure you have noticed the warnings which you see in the SharePoint Health Analyzer and have come up with ideas/fix to get rid of them. Now, it’s ok to ignore these errors in a development or test environment but not in a production environment.

Being SharePoint admins we all know that most of the errors which we see in the Health Analyzer are not really scary and they have nothing to do with the farm’s performance. I think it would be really great if we could find a way to get rid of those errors as you really don’t want to be warned about these errors in the first place. So the main goal of this article is to show you how to do that in SharePoint Server 2013.

Imagine a scenario where your SharePoint farms are being audited for compliance and you don’t want these nasty errors showing up in CA, then this is what you probably need to do.

Note:

It would be really worthwhile to do research on all the alerts and identify the root cause of it and make sure it’s not really scary and then implement these steps. Do not directly implement this on any rule without having a proper understanding about that rule.

Also, please note the errors which you see in the Health analyzer are driven by a timer job which runs in the background and hence deleting a rule by using the “delete” button will not really help. Once the next timer job for the corresponding rule kicks off the alerts will be back in place.

Now, let’s take a look at the steps.

To modify the rule definitions, select Site Contents from the settings menu (gear) in Central Admin, Locate the Health Analyzer Rule Definitions library as shown in the image below.
Open the library and select a rule you wish to modify,
Click Edit Item from the top ribbon,
You may now modify the scope, schedule, enabled, and repair automatically properties,

Here are some tweaks I have made which may go against best practices but can be explained.

Let’s take the “Drives are running out of free space” rule as an example. Now if you want to know about this rule, please go through this link.

Once you have gone through the above link you will have understood that this rule is not really scary and can be ignored. So in order to ignore an alert you have to go ahead and disable it. Also taking a look at the screenshot below you will have noticed that there is already a rule that warns of drives actually running out of disk space. I don't need to be warned about the risk. This alert was occurring against the C: drive of our servers however there is plenty of free space and since we keep our logs on E: there shouldn't be any worry. The threshold here deals with the amount of memory on the server and having enough room for logs and memory dump files. I think we are safe and hence we can go ahead and disable it.

In order to disable it, please perform these steps mentioned below:

Choose the rule which you want to disable and click on the edit button in the top ribbon interface and uncheck the “enabled” checkbox.
Do the same for both the rules corresponding to “Disk space”. Disable both the alerts. Once done this is how the status of the both the alerts will look like ( see screenshot below ).
Finally I deleted these alerts from the list of health analyzer alerts as well in CA and the next timer job didn’t bring it back.