Best Practice to troubleshoot a Crawler Issue after SQL Server restarts

Question

Hi Everyone
I am after some general advice or a suggested place to start when troubleshooting crawler issues after an unplanned, out-of-sequence server restart.
Specifically, the SQL Database in the SharePoint 2010 farm. Better yet, is there a standard practice way of resolving such issues?<o:p></o:p>
So far articles I have found suggest options from reviewing the crawl logs, creating a new crawl component, right through to using fiddler to monitor the crawler.
Are these sufficient places to start / methodologies to follow, what else should be considered?
Any advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

Answer 1

Well, as I said before, there are lots of different potential issues & resolutions for crawlers.  It really depends on the issue.  I would say that the base troubleshooting steps start the same no matter which service/feature you are looking
at.  So, I'll try to keep this sort of generic, but beyond finding the details of the problem, the SOP or process will vary greatly based on what the error is.  I hope this helps, and sorry if it's not specific enough.
1 - check the ULS logs
2 - check the windows application logs
3 - verify related services are running (get-spserviceinstance), possibly stop/start them to reprovision the instance on the affected server
4 - clear the config cache (this alone will clear about 30% of your basic problems)
6 - verify disk space & resource consumption on affected server (& SQL, SQL is always the potential to be the true "affected" server)
7 - iisreset
8 - verify connectivity between all servers in the farm and SP
9 - verify requir3ed features activated
10- check if any changes were made to environment recently (new hardware, updates to OS or apps, updates to GPOs, new solutions, etc)
11- check if the issue is reproducible in another environment (only reliable if this is a similar environment, i.e. same patch level test farm or dr farm).  see if it occurs in other site collections within the web app, different web apps, different
servers/browsers, etc, basically just try to nail down the scope of the problem
There is a whole slew of thiings you could check from verifying certificates & perms, to rerunning psconfig, to checking registry keys, again I go back to it depends.  hopefully this can get you started though.  in the end ULS is where all
the real info on the issue is going to be, so make sure you check there.  don't go in with tunnel vision either.  if you see other errors in ULS, check them out, they may or may not be related; SharePoint is an intricate product with way more moving
parts than most systems.  fix the little quick ones that you know you can handle, this will help to keep the farm clean and healthy, as well as crossing them off the list of potential suspects for your root cause.
Christopher Webb | MCM: SharePoint 2010 | MCSM: SharePoint Charter | MCT | http://christophermichaelwebb.com