Monitoring Large Lists in SharePoint Online with Office365Mon

One of the enduring realities I saw over and over in my many years working at Microsoft with SharePoint, is that customers LOVE the lists they can create in SharePoint.  They’re super easy to set up, you can quick do all kinds of sorting, filtering and searching on them, and it requires no technical expertise to get up and running and with them.  This led to another enduring reality, which is that many customers started loving lists TOO much.  I saw many, many customers over the years that had lists that had just exploded in size.  As these lists grew larger, the performance in using them tends to get worse and worse.  This problem was also compounded by the fact that many developers saw SharePoint lists as a quick and easy place to store data for their application.  That meant even bigger lists sizes, and more people using them more often.

Over the years, we developed lots of documentation and options for improving the performance of your lists.  As customers have moved to SharePoint Online in Office 365 though, we would occasionally hear people ask if it had the same large list limitations as SharePoint on premises does…and the answer is yes, it does.  Now as more customers are moving their SharePoint on premises data to SharePoint Online, we see increasing concern about how the lists they do have are going to perform once it’s all up in Office 365.  Fortunately, at Office365Mon, we’ve just released a new feature designed specifically to help you stay on top of this issue.

List Monitoring is a feature that lets you select one or more lists in SharePoint Online for us to monitor.  For the lists that we’re monitoring, we will do a couple of things:  first, we’ll issue health probes for each list that we’re monitoring and render the default view for it to see what the performance is like.  That’s typically one of the first places where you’ll see performance issues with a large list.  You can configure List Monitoring so that it will send you a notification if it takes longer than “x” seconds to render the default view, where “x” is a number that you decide.

The second thing we’ll do is keep tabs on how large the list is, i.e. how many items it contains.  Again, you can set a threshold for us to look for, and when a monitored list gets bigger than that threshold, we’ll send you a notification to alert you to it.  So, for example, if you’re worried about a large list approaching that magic 5,000 item limit, you can have us notify you when it’s getting close.  Here’s a screen shot of where you configure the monitoring thresholds:

Selecting the lists to be monitored is also quite simple – we provide you with a collection of all of the lists in the SharePoint Online site that we’re monitoring, and you can just check boxes next to the lists you want us to monitor for you.  It can be any of the lists that come out of the box with SharePoint, or any custom list that you’ve created:

Once we’ve started monitoring lists for you, not only will we notify you according to the thresholds you’ve configured, but as you’ve come to expect from Office365Mon, we also have a nice set of reports you can use to see where you stand.  To begin with, you can see the performance of the recent health probes we’ve issued against monitored lists in our Average Response Time report.  It shows the performance of all of the resources that we’re monitoring for you, including monitored lists.  We also have a new report that shows you the average performance each month just for your monitored lists:

In addition to that, we have a report that shows you the size of your monitored lists each day, so you can visualize any growth trends that might be happening that you need to get in front of:

We also provide a monthly view of the average size of each monitored list, so you have a longer-term view of how rapidly your lists are growing:

Being aware of large lists and their impact on performance is one of the best ways to ensure a good experience for your users.  I’ve heard many, many times from customers that say “our site is slow”.  There are lots of reasons why that might be, but a couple of the most common reasons are slow query times and large lists.  At Office365Mon we’ve provided monitoring for your query execution time for nearly a year now.  With the new List Monitoring feature, now you can also know when you have large list performance problems.  Once you know that, you can start working on a mitigation strategy – splitting the data out into multiple lists, creating customized views of the data, etc., etc., etc.  There are a lot of different things you can do to work on improving the performance, but if you don’t know you have a problem then you’ll forever be stuck wondering why your users keep telling you that your “site is slow”.  Take advantage of features like these to stay in the know and stay in control of your Office 365 tenant, and keep everyone happy.  Start by visiting us at https://www.office365mon.com and clicking the Configure…List Monitoring menu.

This is yet another feature at Office365Mon that was driven from feedback by our customers.  I hope you’ll take a look at this feature and as always, let us know how we can make it better as well as ways in which we might be able to help you to do Office 365 monitoring even better.

From Sunny Phoenix,

Steve