SharePoint Pain

[Applies to SharePoint 2016; not tested on other versions of SharePoint] Sometimes you see this false error on Health Analyzer saying that "Account used by application pools or service identities are in the local machine Administrators group": You have confirmed that the reported servers for the “Failing Servers” don’t have the farm account in their local admins group. Script to verify: Foreach($server in (Get-SPServer| ? {$_.Role-NE "Invalid"})) {     $server = $server.ToString().TrimStart("SPServer Name=")     Invoke-Command -ComputerName $server {      Get-LocalGroupMember -Group Administrators      } | select ObjectClass, Name, PrincipalSource, PSComputerName | sort -Property PSComputerName | ft -GroupBy PSComputerName } And yet, hitting the “Reanalyze Now” button does not clear out the error.  Diagnosis The Health Analyzer does not “see” the absence of the farm account in the local admins group until the reported server’s Share...

Occasionally Health Analyzer shows the patch-mismatch error even after fully applying SharePoint cumulative updates. You even confirmed the successful upgrade status on the Upgrade Status page at https://caUrl/_admin/UpgradeStatus.aspx, but the Servers in Farm and Review Problems and Solutions pages show some servers are still not patched: Diagnosis Health Analyzer can produce the false report on some servers due to: One or more content databases still need to be upgraded. They get upgraded when you run psconfig or Config Wizard, but the upgrade status doesn't seem to “stick” afterwards sometimes. To verify, go to Upgrade and Migration > Review database status on Central Admin. A job or registry key is not in the correct state. The CreateProductVersionJob registry key was the culprit in the past (ref: http://blog.stefan-gossner.com/2016/08/09/sharepoint-patching-and-get-spproduct-local ). However, it appears that something else is also causing the error, as the false report...

Applies to SharePoint 2016; not tested on other versions of SharePoint.   Symptoms   Central Admin’s Health Analyzer reports that the farm account or an unknown account (sometimes it doesn’t show the account name) is in the Local Administrators group on some servers:   However, you see that the reported warning is false:   Diagnosis   The Timer Service failed to recycle on the associated servers. It is scheduled to recycle at 0600 on all servers and occasionally it fails on some servers due to an internal conflict: Direct links to the Job History page of Timer Service Recycle : https://caUrl/_admin/TimerJobHistory.aspx?View=4&JobId=<guid> Remedy   Method 1: Click any of the Timer Service Recycle links on the Job History page (direct URLs above), hit Run Now , and wait for about 10 minutes to let it finish (check the Timer Job Status page): 2. Go back to Health Analyzer and hit Reanalyze Now to verify. Method 2: Restart the SharePoint Tim...

Applies to SharePoint 2016; not tested on other versions of SharePoint.   Symptoms   Central Admin's Health Analyzer shows:   -         Title: One or more services have started or stropped unexpectedly. -         Explanation: The following services are managed by SharePoint, but their running state does not match what SharePoint expects: c2wts -         Remedy: To stop or start a service managed by SharePoint, use the SharePoint service management interface in the SharePoint Central Administration Site. If a service has crashed, restart the service manually on the affected servers by running “net start [service name]” from a command prompt.   Service status shows c2wts (Claims to Windows Token Service) is not running even though it’s set to “Startup type: Automatic”. When you try to start the service, it gives:   Windows could not start the c2wts service...

Symptoms   On Central Admin, Health Analyzer shows "The timer service failed to recycle" warning:   Diagnosis The Timer Service Recycle job was blocked by other running Timer jobs, such as: The running jobs that block the Recycle job could be stuck in the running mode and need to be verified first. Remedy 1.       Make a note of the Failing Servers in the report and run the Timer Service Recycle Job from Central Admin > Monitoring > Job Definitions > Timer Service Recycle .  ( Direct URL:  https://<caDomainName>/_admin/JobEdit.aspx?JobId=<guid>) Click the "Run Now" button. This will kick off the Job across all servers in the farm.  2.       Go to the Running Jobs page (https://<caDomainName>/_admin/ServiceRunningJobs.aspx) and wait until the Job finishes. It will take several minutes. 3.       Check the Job History page (https://<caDomainName>/_admin/Tim...