Wednesday, June 15, 2016

SharePoint 2013 Search Administration Exceptions Filling Event Logs


After a patch cycle the Event log starts filling up on the web/app servers -

Machine generated alternative text:
i Local Server 
Manageability 
Events


The following 6398 Timer errors start appearing every 10/30 minutes in the event viewer:

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.QueryClassificationDictionaryUpdateTimerJobDefinition (ID <GUID>) threw an exception. More information is included below.

Unable to locate Managed Metadata Proxy which is default keyword taxonomy for SSA <ID>

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CustomDictionaryDeploymentJobDefinition (ID <GUID>) threw an exception. More information is included below.
Failed to run flow Microsoft.CustomDictionaryDeployment. Correlation Id: <ID>.

All of the search functions still work, so nothing actually seems to be malfunctioning, however having the event viewer constantly full of false positives could potentially create a situation where important events are missed, or it becomes unnecessarily difficult to find an event you're looking for.

There are several suggestions when searching online -

  1. In the Managed Metadata Service Application, check "This service application is the default storage location for keywords" and "This service application is the default storage location for column specific term sets".
  2. Give your search service account access to the Managed Metadata Service Application.
  3. Re-run the configuration wizard on the servers one by one.
  4. Reset the Index and do a full crawl.

None of these suggestions work if the Managed Metadata Service Application was never added or configured in the first place. Rather than adding an unnecessary service application, I opted to just disable the unneeded Timer jobs from the Central Administrator.

From the CA click on Monitoring, Check Job Status, then click Job History on the left side navigation.

From the View: drop down, select Failed Jobs.

Machine generated alternative text:
View: 
All 
All 
Web Application 
Job Definition 
Failed Jobs 
6/15/2016 12:01 PM

This will bring up all of the failed Timer jobs. We're looking for the Query Classification Dictionary and Search Custom Dictionaries jobs.

Machine generated alternative text:
Job Title 
Query Classification Dictionary 
update for Search Application 
Search Service Application. 
Search Custom Dictionaries Update 
Web Application 
Duration (hh:mmss) 
Failed 
Failed

Click on the job and click on the Job Title, and then click on Disable. Repeat for the second job.

Machine generated alternative text:
Query Classification Dictionary update for Search Application Search Service Application. 
Periodically updates dictionary used for query classification. 
Web application: 
Last run time: 
This timer job is scheduled to run: 
N/A 
6/15/2016 12:00 PM 
@ Minutes Every 30 
minute(s) 
O Hourly 
C) Daily 
O Weekly 
C) Monthly 
Run 
Disable 
Cancel

7 comments:

  1. These erros have been driving me insanse on a couple of legacy SP2013 installs that we have. No metadata service set up, so couldn't understand why we were getting the error. This is a nice little work around to make the logs cleaner.

    As you said, if things like the metadata service are not used, no point in provisioning them.

    Thank you!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Does this harm the search on the site at all?

    ReplyDelete
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