New Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013

In this article we can explore the new Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013.

What is Developer Dashboard?

Developer Dashboard is an Instrumentation Framework. It allows us to trace requests, SQL queries and ULS logs within the browser.

The URL for accessing the Developer Dashboard is:

http://server/_layouts/15/devdash.aspx

The following is the screenshot of the latest Developer Dashboard.

How to enable the Developer Dashboard

By default the Developer Dashboard is disabled.

We need to turn it to ON from the current OFF state. To turn it ON, open the SharePoint Command Window (in Administrative Mode) and enter the following PowerShell command:

$content = ([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService)
$dashboardSettings =$content.DeveloperDashboardSettings
$dashboardSettings.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::On
$dashboardSettings.Update()

On enabling it, we can see the Dashboard icon in the default master page.

Please note that you might need the PowerShell Snapin to invoke the Cmdlets. You can get it from:

sharepointcto

Instrumentation

We can click on each Request URL to view the associated Instrumentation data:

1. Server Info
2. Scopes
3. SQL
4. SPRequests
5. Asserts
6. Service Calls
7. ULS
8. Cache Calls

SQL

Using the SQL tab, we can extract the SQL associated with a request.

You can click on the SELECT link to see the query associated.

 

ULS

Using the ULS tab, we can extract the Unified Logging Service outputs associated with a request.

 

 

 

 

Please note that in SharePoint 2010 we had the ULS integrated with the page that leads to page loading performance issues.

References

msdn.microsoft

Summary

In this article we explored the new Developer Dashboard and how to enable it.