Enable Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

Developer Dashboard is one of the hidden gems available on SharePoint 2010. Often overlooked by administrators, this neat feature, disabled by default, provides performance and tracing information that can be put into good use to debug and troubleshoot page rendering time issues. Pages loading slow or webparts behaving badly? Is it the server resources or the database queries are taking too long?

Enabling this great feature will help you get critical information about execution time, log correlation ID, critical events, database queries, service calls, SPRequests allocation and webpart events offsets.

As I mentioned above, the developer dashboard is turned off by default, but it can be enabled very easy via stsadm or PowerShell.

Enable Developer Dashboard via stsadm:

‘On’ Mode:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv on

‘OnDemand’ Mode:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv ondemand

Disable Developer Dashboard via stsadm:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv off

Enable Developer Dashboard via PowerShell (SharePoint 2010 Management Shell):

‘OnDemand’ Mode:

$sp2010 = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings;
$sp2010.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::OnDemand;
$sp2010.RequiredPermissions = 'EmptyMask';
$sp2010.TraceEnabled = $true;
$sp2010.Update();

‘On’ Mode:

$sp2010 = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings;
$sp2010.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::On;
$sp2010.RequiredPermissions = 'EmptyMask';
$sp2010.TraceEnabled = $true;
$sp2010.Update();

Disable Developer Dashboard – ‘Off’ Mode:

$sp2010 = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings;
$sp2010.DisplayLevel = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::Off;
$sp2010.Update();

If you enabled the Developer Dashboard using the OnDemand mode you should see on the left hand side of the ribbon a small icon next to the login credentials. If you chose to go with the On mode you will not see the small icon but the Developer Dashboard will be available on the bottom of all your page. To disable the Developer Dashboard just use one of the Off modes on stsadm or PowerShell.