Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Search, 2 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: The Canary in the coalmine or how to keep an eye on the SharePoint Search updates

Description

In this 6-minute developer-focused demo, Kasper Bo Larsen delivers a simple brute force solution that addresses unadvertised search outages that affect customer’s search result accuracy – site performance. The early warning system monitors search refresh - site indexing activities using an Azure function to compare SharePoint list and index values every 5 minutes. If values don’t match after 30 minutes, email is sent to the admin account.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Viva Connections & SharePoint Framework Bi-weekly sync call recorded on April 20, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Kasper Bo Larsen (Fellowmind) | @kasperbolarsen

Supporting materials
• Repo - The canary in the coalmine | https://github.com/kasperbolarsen/thecanaryinthecoalmine/

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

A

B

The coal mine um or the subtitle is how to keep an eye on your SharePoint search updates because, as some of you might know, we don't really have an SLA for any updates to the search index and a lot of us are creating a lot of solutions which are based on search, and we can't really see anything in the M365 Health dashboard about how well the search index is is actually performing. So that's what we're going to to discuss today.

B

My name is Casper Larson and you can contact me on Twitter using that handle and you can find me on GitHub as well and I'm, primarily working on the PNP, modern search and the BMP script, samples repositories and I'm from Denmark and I work in the film Denmark.

B

So the reason for this initial version is that I had some outages on search, and you can't really see that anywhere. So I had to figure out how to make a early warning system, and this is exactly what I've done here: I just use brute force. So what I do is that I have my SharePoint list always use SharePoint? That's uh that's where I grew up and the only thing I have is basically a single list item where I update the value, but the only thing I do is basically I.

B

Have my list item and I update that and then I have an Azure function which will trigger that you've just saw there. It triggers every five minutes. That's the interval I've decided on in this case, and so every five minutes I check that the value I have here match the ones I have in the search index.

B

If it does, then I'll just update this one, it's just basically a date time tips and so I'll update that on if it doesn't match yet, which I don't expect within five minutes. That's that would be exceptional if it doesn't match I'll just try again later and once I uh do this I just put that into my login list. So in five minutes, I update this list saying whether I either if I found the same identical values or not.

B

So it's um it's a pretty simple warning system and if it exceeds some threshold, it could be like 30 minutes for the item to be picked up and put into the search index.

B

I can issue a warning or put on a red light in my intranet or whatever I want, but now at least I know that the solutions that I have built working on search might have an issue, and I can warn my uh my users that they might not rely that much on what they see right now, but it I hope it will be better later on and I can also raise a service request for Microsoft uh support. Just to let them know that we have an outage right now.

B

A sort of like an ouch is because we don't have an SLA. So at least we have a bad performance right now on the search index and that might raise awareness so that they might be able to allocate some more resources for it, because the search index is sort of like a priority based. So if somebody on the farm are doing a lot of heavy duty work, you might get a throttle sort of throttle, basically meaning that the search index doesn't update.

B

That often the problem is that the farm Concept in Office 365 is basically a number of tenants. We don't even know how many tenants are in a farm. It could be thousands, so we don't know who is actually the culprit here, who's actually doing a lot of heavy duty work and slowing us down. So basically we just have to learn to live with it. So that's why, at this early warning system might be a good idea.

B

Just put all of this into my repository, which is of course available for for download, and you can use it as you please, but, as you see I'm, just using basically my SharePoint any SharePoint site a list for uh the the target of my uh comparison, where I use, search and I use, get the list item and then I do just login into any kind of logging list, and this one says I said in the Azure function. Some people might be concerned about the cost of this asset function. It's hitting this.

B

It's triggered every five minutes, so it must be pretty expensive. People might guess, as far as I could tell and I've been running this for more than a half a year. Now it cost me about two dollars each month and I would like to spend two dollars in order to sleep well and know that if something happens then I know it. First then, before my end, users are starting to to call me uh early in the morning.

B

So uh that's from for me, that is important, but all I do is basically uh down here. I just get my list item looking at the tick value, I request the same item again using search, compare those two values and if they're identical everything is fine, I'll just reset, if it's not fine, I'll log it into a to the login list and if it exceeds some kind of threshold I can do something in this case is just that: I send an email to myself, but that is completely up to you and I'll.

B

Make sure that the link to this repository is in the in in the show notes, sort of I think that was all for for my presentation so have.

A

Fun with it fantastic. Thank you very much for sharing that Casper um short and sweet, but fantastic, see the reaction in the uh in the chat with a lot of people excited about what you've just shared. So thank you very much for coming on and talking about that today.