I hope you all had the pleasure to try out the new and improved Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s a fantastic improvement to its predecessor and contains a huge number of improvements. One of the most notable ones is that it’s no longer a control on your page which only shows you information about the current request. It’s now a separate window which shows you all requests since you started the developer dashboard session. It can actually compete somewhat with ULSViewer!
Note: this is written for SharePoint 2013 Preview - stuff might/will change in the future. Even though, if this is changed I’m confused :)
How to turn on the Developer Dashboard
Turning on the Developer Dashboard is done exactly as before in SharePoint 2010. You use PowerShell for that. The only difference is that the developer dashboard now only have two modes; On or Off. The old OnDemand mode is deprecated and if you set it to OnDemand it will act as On.
$svc = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService
$dds = $svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings
$dds.DisplayLevel = "On"
$dds.Update()
My Developer Dashboard does not show anything!!!
So, now you have turned on the Developer Dashboard and you would like to check out how cool it really is. You click on the developer dashboard icon in the upper right and the new dev dashboard window opens.
If you’re a real IT-Pro (or any kind of SharePoint professional for that matter) you have not used the Farm Configuration Wizard and configured all your services “automagically”. Instead you have created your services manually or by scripting them. Also to save some RAM memory you have not fired up the (new) Search Service, to avoid those pesky noderunners (can’t help thinking about Lode Runner when I see em).
If this is the case you will likely not see any data logged in the Developer Dashboard, instead you’ll find these entries in your ULS Trace log: "
WCF Request GET failed with error Store hasn't been provisioned
“. A similar error is also shown in Fiddler.
Fortunately the fix is really easy! It all comes down to how the Developer Dashboard now is implemented. Previously it was a “simple” control on your page showing the current request only. The new 2013 Developer Dashboard depends on the Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application. This is a Service Application that you need to create through PowerShell and it’s a simple one-liner.
New-SPUsageApplication -Name "Usage Application" -DatabaseName "SP2013A_Logging"
Just modify the line above with the name that you would like to have for the service application and enter a database name as you prefer (if you leave out the -DatabaseName parameter a database called WSS_Logging will be created).
Once this is done, the Service Application should start logging to the database and the Developer Dashboard should start showing some neat logging data.
Happy tracing…