SharePoint 2013: Crawl status live monitoring

Whenever I set up a new content source in SharePoint 2013 search, or when I change the processing in the Content Enrichment Web Service I need to monitor the progress of the crawl.Typically I need to:

• Check if I get any warnings or errors
• Check if the Documents Per Second (DPS) / throughput was affected
• Abort the crawl if it results in errors 

In the old days of FAST ESP I would typically start feeding some content to the index, and then monitor using the doclog tool. There is no equivalent tool in SharePoint 2013. The only thing I could find was a CrawlStatus and CrawlState set for a content source. This state and status did not seem to be live, however. In my experience they usually showed me the status of a previous crawl.

My colleague Brian Pendergrass gave me an example of how I could peek directly into the database to get the live crawl status. After some fiddling I managed to get a script working that starts my crawl and then monitors progress with some live statistics until it's done. Here's an example of the script in action:

Here's the full script (content2.ps1). It is also available for download at the end of this article.

param([string]$Name, [switch]$StartFullCrawl)

function getCrawlStatus($ssa)
{
    $ret = $null
    if ($ssa)
    {
        $queryString = "SELECT ";
        $queryString += "MSSCrawlHistory.CrawlId, ";
        $queryString += "MAX (MSSCrawlHistory.Status) AS Status, ";
        $queryString += "MAX (MSSCrawlHistory.SubStatus) AS SubStatus, ";
        $queryString += "MAX (MSSCrawlHistory.StartTime) AS CrawlStart, ";
        $queryString += "SUM (MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics.SuccessCount) as Successes, ";
        $queryString += "SUM (MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics.ErrorCount) as Errors, ";
        $queryString += "SUM (MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics.WarningCount) as Warnings, ";
        $queryString += "SUM (MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics.RetryCount) as Retries ";
        $queryString += "FROM ["+$ssa.SearchAdminDatabase.Name+"].[dbo].[MSSCrawlHistory] WITH (nolock) ";
        $queryString += "INNER JOIN ["+$ssa.SearchAdminDatabase.Name+"].[dbo].[MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics] ";
        $queryString += "ON MSSCrawlHistory.CrawlId = MSSCrawlComponentsStatistics.CrawlId ";
        $queryString += "WHERE MSSCrawlHistory.Status Not In (5,11,12)";
        $queryString += "GROUP By MSSCrawlHistory.CrawlId";
        
        $dataSet = New-Object System.Data.DataSet "ActiveCrawlReport"
        if ((New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter($queryString, $ssa.SearchAdminDatabase.DatabaseConnectionString)).Fill($dataSet))
        {
            $ret = $dataSet.Tables[0] | SELECT CrawlId, CrawlStart, Status, SubStatus, Successes, Errors, Warnings
        }
    }
    return $ret
}

function monitorCrawlStatus($ssa)
{
    $cs = getCrawlStatus($ssa)
    if ($cs -eq $null)
    {
        Write-Host "No active crawls"
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host "Monitoring crawl status"
        while ($cs = getCrawlStatus($ssa))
        {
            $ts = $cs.CrawlStart
            $tnow = [system.timezoneinfo]::ConvertTimeToUtc((Get-Date))
            $tdiff = $tnow - $ts
            $seconds = $tdiff.TotalSeconds
            $docs = $cs.Successes
            $dps = 0
            if ($seconds -gt 0)
            {
                $dps = $docs / $seconds
                $dps = [Math]::Round($dps, 2)
            }
            Write-Host ("CrawlId:" + $cs.CrawlId + ", Status: " + $cs.Status + ", Successes: " + $cs.Successes + ", Warnings: " + $cs.Warnings + ", Errors: " + $cs.Errors + ", (" + $dps + " DPS)")
            Start-Sleep 5
        }
    }
}

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
if ($ssa)
{
    if ($Name)
    {
        $contentSource = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -SearchApplication $ssa | ?{ $_.Name -eq $Name}
        if ($contentSource)
        {
            if ($StartFullCrawl)
            {
        
                Write-Host "Starting full crawl"
                Write-Host "Content source $Name"
                $contentSource.StartFullCrawl();
                
                # Let the crawl get some time to start before we monitor it
                Start-Sleep 10
                monitorCrawlStatus($ssa)
            }
            else
            {
                $contentSource
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Write-Error "Can't find content source with name $Name"
        }
    }
    else
    {
        Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -SearchApplication $ssa        
        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "Usage: content.ps1 [-StartFullCrawl] [-Name <contentSource>]"
        
        if ($MonitorActiveCrawls)
        {
            monitorCrawlStatus($ssa)
        }
    }
}
else
{
    Write-Error "Can't find SSA"
}

content2.ps1