Developer Dashboard has been a friendly tool used by developers since SharePoint 2010, to isolate the bugs introduced by a faulty code, and to estimate the page performance and other page related monitoring needs.
Once the developer dashboard is enabled, we can see a new icon on the top right corner. Clicking on it will pop up the developer dashboard.
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However, in my case, the developer dashboard was coming up empty, as shown below.
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The first step to check was if 'Usage and Health Service Application' is created and is in a running state.![]()
Unfortunately, for me it was running. So, I had no other option but to disable developer dashboard and start over the provisioning of Usage and Health Service Application from scratch to see if it works. You can run the below command in SharePoint 2016 Management Shell to disable the developer dashboard.
- $ContentService = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService
- $DevDashboard = $ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings
- $DevDashboard.DisplayLevel = "Off"
- $DevDashboard.Update()
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Once it is done, delete the Usage and Health Service application from Service Applications page and run the below command to re-provision the service application.
- New-SPUsageApplication -Name "Usage and Health Service Application" -DatabaseName "Usage_DB"
- $Usage = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy | where {$_.TypeName -like "Usage*"}
- $Usage.Provision()
Now, run the below command to enable developer dashboard once again.
- $ContentService = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService
- $DevDashboard = $ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings
- $DevDashboard.DisplayLevel = "On"
- $DevDashboard.Update()
This time, the developer dashboard has come up and is showing the request traffic in the page as it should.
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Summary - Thus, we saw how to resolve the "empty developer dashboard" issue in SharePoint Server 2016.