One Tool to Rule Them All

In my opinion, there should have been fireworks. Lots of fireworks.

What is it?

If you’re not familiar with the Page Diagnostics Tool for SharePoint, then I need to share a little history on how I came to be “meet” this tool.

Back in 2018, the SharePoint Conference North America (SPCNA) was rebooted after having been shutdown as part of Microsoft’s consolidation of product-specific conferences a number of years earlier. I had the good fortune of making the cut to deliver a couple of sessions at the conference: “Making the Most of OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online” and “Understanding and Avoiding Performance Pitfalls with SharePoint Online.”

Sometime in the months leading up to the conference, I received an email from out-of-the-blue from a guy named Scott Stewart – who at the time was a Senior Program Manager for OneDrive and SharePoint Engineering. In the email, Scott introduced himself, what he did in his role, and suggested that we collaborate together for the performance session I was slated to deliver at SPCNA.

I came to understand that Scott and his team were responsible for addressing and remedying many of the production performance issues that arose in SharePoint Online (SPO). The more that Scott and I chatted, the more it sounded like we were preaching many of the same things when it came to performance.

One thing Scott revealed to me was that at the time, his team had been working on a tool to help diagnose SPO performance issues. The tool was projected to be ready around the time that SPCNA was happening, so I asked him if he’d like to co-present the performance session with me and announce the tool to an audience that would undoubtedly be eager to hear the news. Thankfully, he agreed!

Scott demo’d version one (really it was more like a beta) during our talk, and the demo demons got the better of him … but shortly after the conference, v1.0 of the tool went live and was available to download as a Chrome browser extension.

So, what does it do?

Simply put, the Page Diagnostics Tool for SharePoint analyzes your browser’s interaction with SPO and points out conditions and configurations that might be adversely affecting your page’s performance.

The first version of the tool only worked for classic publishing pages. And as a tool, it was only available as a Google Chrome Extension:

The second iteration of the tool that was released last Thursday addresses one of those limitations: it analyzes both modern and classic SharePoint pages. So, you’re covered no matter what’s on your SPO site.

What Can the Tool Tell Me?

For one thing, the tool can get you the metrics I’ve highlighted that are relevant to diagnosing basic page performance issues – most notably, SPRequestDuration and SPIisLatency. But it can do so much more than that!

Many of the adverse performance conditions and scenarios I’ve covered while speaking and in blog posts (such as this one here) are analyzed and called-out by the tool, as well as many other things/conditions, such as navigational style used, whether or not content deployment networks (CDNs) are used by your pages, and quite a few more.

And finally, the tool provides a simple mechanism for retrieving round-trip times for pages and page resource requests. It eliminates the need to pull up Fiddler or your browser’s debug tools to try and track down the right numbers from a scrolling list of potentially hundreds of requests and responses.

How Do I Use It?

It’s easy, but I’ll summarize it for you here.

1. Open the Chrome Web Store. Currently, the extension is only available for Google Chrome. Open Chrome and navigate to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/sharepoint directly or search for “SharePoint” in the Chrome Web Store. However you choose to do it, you should see the Page Diagnostics Tool for SharePoint entry within the list of results as shown below.

2. Add the Extension to Chrome. Click the Add to Chrome button. You’ll be taken directly to the diagnostic tool’s specific extension page, and then Chrome will pop up a dialog like the one seen below. The dialog will describe what the tool will be able to do once you install it, and yes: you have to click Add Extension to accept what the dialog is telling you and to actually activate the extension in your browser.

3. Navigate to a SharePoint Online page to begin diagnosing it. Once you’ve got the extension installed, you should have the following icon in the tool area to the right of the URL/address bar in Chrome:

To illustrate how the tool works, I navigated to a modern Communication Site in my Bitstream Foundry tenant:

I then clicked on the SharePoint Page Diagnostics Tool icon in the upper right of the browser (as shown above). Doing so brings up the Page Diagnostics dialog and gives me some options:

Kicking off an analysis of the current page is as simple as clicking the Start button as shown above. Once you do so, the page will reload and the Tool dialog will change several times over the course of a handful of seconds based on what it’s loading, analyzing, and attempting to do.

When the tool has completed its analysis and is ready to share some recommendations, the dialog will change once again to show something similar to what appears below.

Right off the bat, you can see that the Page Diagnostics Tool supplies you with important metrics like the SPRequestDuration and SPIIsLatency – two measures that are critical to determining where you might have some slowdown as called out in a previous blog post. But the tool doesn’t stop there.

The tool does many other things – like look at the size of your images, whether or not you’re using structural navigation (because structural navigation is oh so bad for your SPO site performance), if you’re using content delivery networks (CDNs) for frequently used scripts and resources, and a whole lot more.

Let’s drill into one of the problem items it calls out on one of my pages:

The tool explains to me, in plain English, what is wrong: Large images detected. An image I’m using is too large (i.e., larger than 300KB). It supplies the URL of the image in question so that I’m not left wondering which image it’s calling out. And if I want to know why 300KB is special or simply learn about the best way to handle images in SharePoint Online, there’s a Learn More link. Clicking that link takes me to this page in Microsoft Docs:

Targeted and detailed guidance – exactly what you need in order to do some site fixup/cleanup in the name of improving performance.

Wrapping-Up

There’s more that the tool can do – like provide round trip times for pages and assets within those pages, as well as supply a couple of data export options if you want to look at the client/server page conversation in a tool that has more capabilities.

As a one-stop shop tool, though, I’m going to basically start recommending that everyone with an SPO site start downloading the tool for use within their own tenants. There is simply no other tool that is easier and more powerful for SharePoint Online sites. And the price point is perfect: FREE!

The next time you see Scott Stewart, buy him a beer to thank him for giving us something usable in the fight against poorly performing SPO sites.

References and Resources

1. Company: Microsoft
2. Browser Extension: Page Diagnostics for SharePoint
3. Microsoft Docs: Use the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool
4. Conference: The SharePoint Conference North America
5. Presentation Resource: Making the Most of OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
6. Presentation Resource: Understanding and Avoiding Performance Pitfalls with SharePoint Online
7. LinkedIn: Scott Stewart
8. Blog Post: The Five-Minute Page Performance Troubleshooting Guide for SharePoint Online
9. Blog Post: Caching, You Ain’t No Friend of Mine
10. Tool: Telerik Fiddler
11. Web Page: Chrome Web Store Extensions
12. Microsoft Docs: Optimize images in SharePoint Online modern site pages