When administrating SharePoint you will experience errors.  Another thing you will notice when working with SharePoint is that the error description can be pretty vague.   Even if the error seems to have decent detail you can be thrown for a loss for how to solve it.  If you Google a specific error's event id you will be amazed at the multiple solutions or the lack of solutions for many errors.  SharePoint is a great product but it is a complex system.  SharePoint is made of many components and touches many parts of your environment.  Here are a few of the areas you need to worry about IIS, SQL, Search Services, Excel Services, authentication, and performance.  How do I start fixing my errors and make sense of these event ids?  Start by assembling a decent toolkit. Today there are a number of free tools that are available to help in diagnosing errors in SharePoint.  Here is a list of tools that I use and keep available to help make diagnosing errors easier. 

Initial Information Gathering & Environment

1.  Web browser and Search-

Searching for errors can be very frustrating but if you are experiencing an error chances someone has already experienced the same error.  

2.  SPSReport -

This is probably the first tool I use it creates a .cab that contains pretty much everything you need on your current SharePoint setup from hot fixes, registry settings, and IIS information. Note that the program does not right to your registry and does not install any files. This tool is free and does have an expatriation so check the site to make sure a new version has not become available.

3.  SharePoint Inspector -

This is a great tool for getting the structure and properties of SharePoint environment.  This is more of a developers tool but still of use to an admin.

4.  LogParser

Microsoft Log Parser for universal access to text based data.

Monitoring

1.  SharePoint Logging Spy -

Provides a real time view of the ULS logs & the Event logs from multiple machines in your SharePoint farm.

2.  Process Monitor -

The old Sysinternals file and process monitor now owned by Microsoft.  Great for determining access violations on files.

3. SQLDiag -

Built in diagnostic tool available in SQL 2005.

Testing and Execution

1.  stsadmWin -

GUI for stsadm.exe.  Good when you are not sure of your options with a stsadm command.

2.  Authentication and Access Control Diagnostics

One of the common type of errors with SharePoint are permission based errors.  This is a good tool for testing and analyzing permissions on sites and folders.

In further posts I will detail ways to go about using these tools to help diagnose and fix errors.