Monitoring Gatherers

The Gatherer is a component of the Microsoft Search service that manages the content crawling process and has rules that determine what content is crawled. The Gatherer receives a URL for content that must be crawled. The URL can be the start address for a content source, a link stored from a previous crawl, or a notification from a SharePoint Portal Server workspace. The Gatherer checks the URL against the crawl restrictions set for this workspace.

Microsoft Search KM for PATROL collects critical information regarding the gatherer, such as filtering activity, document management and overall activity.

The monitoring of a gatherer returns the following parameters, in the PATROL console:

Parameters for monitoring gatherers

•ActiveQueueLength: Numbers of documents waiting for robot threads

•DelayedDocuments: Numbers of documents delayed due to site hit frequency rules

•DocumentsFilteredRate: Number of documents filtered per second

•FilteringThreads: Total number of filtering threads in the system

•FilterObjects: Numbers of filtered objects in the system

•FilterProcesses: Numbers of filtering processes in the system

•Heartbeats: Total number of heartbeats counted since startup

•NotificationsRate: External notifications received per second

•PerformanceLevel: System resources that the gatherer service is allowed to use

•ReasonToBackOff: Code describing why the gatherer service went into back-off state for the current search server

•StemmersCached: Numbers of available cached stemmer instances

Double-click a parameter to draw a graph based on the parameter's data:

Graph – Heartbeats Monitoring