On-premises SharePoint Server concentrates its failures in three places: search, content
databases, and permission inheritance. Read the logs before acting. SharePoint Online
belongs to onedrive-sharepoint-sync.
Climb the Troubleshooting Ladder base skill first, with these specifics. History: a recent
cumulative update — and whether PSConfig ran after it — a SQL change, a content-database
move, or a permissions change; broad breakage right after a patch usually means the upgrade
never finished. Documentation: version and build, server roles, the SQL back end and
content-database layout, search topology, and the authentication model. Evidence: for search, the crawl log's per-item errors and the search
service application's health; for a farm or site error, the ULS entry for the correlation ID
on the error page, not the yellow page itself; for content databases, their status in
Central Administration and SQL.
1. Search crawl failures or stale results — read the crawl log. A crawl stopped or paused,
the crawl account lost access after a password change, the start address is wrong, or
the index is corrupt. Stale results usually mean the crawl isn't completing: fix the
account or connectivity and let it finish. Resetting a corrupt index
is a rebuild-cost decision — set the expectation first.
2. Content database or site down — check its status in Central Administration and SQL, its
schema version against the farm (a mismatch after a partial patch blocks the mount), and
free space. Mounting, dismounting and database-level work go through the SQL owner.
3. Permission inheritance — a user can't reach what they should, or can reach what they
shouldn't. Trace site to library to folder to item and find where inheritance broke and
unique permissions were set. Fix at that level; never break inheritance further to patch
one item — unique permissions at scale are unmanageable and slow, and restoring
inheritance is often the fix. This is groups and inheritance, not NTFS.
4. Post-patch farm config — "the farm needs configuring", services down, or sites erroring
after an update: the CU installed the binaries but PSConfig never completed on all
servers. Finishing the upgrade is the documented fix, but it is a farm-level change:
confirm a backup, plan a window, coordinate. Never run it reactively under pressure.
Never touch SharePoint's databases directly in SQL — editing, detaching or "fixing" a
content database is unsupported and corrupts the farm; act through SharePoint's own tools
and coordinate with the SQL owner. Success is fresh results after a completed crawl, a
healthy content database, or the user reaching exactly what they should. Note in plain text
(PSA Note Discipline base skill): version and build, the correlation ID or crawl-log
evidence, branch, action or handoff, verification.
Magic Library