Index rebuilds - any way to see a progress bar?

[yarg]

Hi all,

Just a quick question please for someone who is still getting to grips with EV2007 linked to Exchange 2003:
We had an issue today where the disk that houses our indexes ran out of space.  As such we had a number of failed indexes.  We had to find a new disk, move the indexes across and start rebuilding.  The problem is we're talking about 100 users and each rebuild takes a very long time.  I'm wary of trying to rebuild all 100 at the same time, so I'm doing them in batches of 10 at the moment.  I'm just curious if there is any way to see what the progress of the rebuild is (a progress bar etc)?  It's frustrating looking at the status and just seeing "Rebuilding".  I would like to be able to monitor the progress more accurately....

Any help/guidance very gratefully received!
Thanks a lot,
Graeme

[TonySterling]

There are entries written to the EV application log that will give you the status.  I dont recall it off the top of my head but look for it from the Index service I believe.

Also, you are doing an Update or Repair, right?  You might not have to rebuild if you copied the Index over, just repair or Update.  Those run much faster.

Regards,

[Paul_Grimshaw]

I suppose there are a few ways of doing this.

1. DTRACE indexserver and storage crawler and look at the ISN of the items being processed. You can then grab the highest ISN for that archive from the database (IndexVolume table) and you will see from that how far you have left to go.

2. You can do the same as the above with a tool called indexcheck. If you run the command indexcheck -f  "Index Path Location" -c stats -db "NAME OF SQL SERVER"

You will get an output of the highest ISN in the index and in the database and this will give you an idea of where you are.

3. The registry key that Tony is referring to is IndexingProgressEvents and will log an event every x amount of times you give this registry key a value. So for example if you give the registry key a value of 1000 then it will log an event every time it has indexed 1000 items

[yarg]

Gentlemen, thank you both for your suggestions.  Our EV server is creaking badly under the strain of doing these index rebuilds: constant 100% CPU over the whole weekend, numerous eventlog errors and only 10 rebuilds/updates completed.  I'm wary of playing with DTRACE and indexcheck options, partially because I don't know how to use them and partially because I don't want to put any extra strain on the server (it takes about 15min just to open the Admin Console on it at the moment, all because of the index rebuilds/updates).  I will examine the registry entry though, as that will no doubt prove useful.

Many thanks,
Graeme

[yarg]

Hi again,

Just another question please: where can I find that reg entry you referred to?  I've got the EV2007 Registry Entries document, but there's no mention of it in there, and I've looked at HKLM\Software\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Indexing but it's not there either...

Thanks,
Graeme

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

I found these instructions:

To monitor progress change the following reg key to a value of decimal 1:
     HKLM > SOFTWARE > KVS > Enterprise Vault > Indexing > IndexingProgressEvents
If the Dword IndexingProgressEvents does not exist create it.

An event will now appear every 10000 items report rebuild progress.

Look for Event ID 7305

[yarg]

Thanks again Gents; at least I now have a better view of what our progress is!

Kind regards,
Graeme