Two easy ways to know when the FAST connector is used in a Sharepoint Farm

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In this blog I will focus list a couple of easy ways to know when the Sharepoint Search Service Application (FAST connector) is configured to work with the FAST Search Server.

The first way it is confirm the web application has associated the correct services.

So navigate to your Central administration || Manage service application || highlight the service application that is supposed to use the FAST search server || and click in the ribbon icon “properties”.

Scroll down the configuration page and check the content distributors’ field points the server’s name where FAST search server is installed; the default port should be 13391.

Now we know that at least the FAST server is involved in the crawling, which is a different topic than performance crawling or even a more basic question, if my crawler is sending data to the indexer?

A more advanced way is looking into the FAST server log.

The file c:\FASTsearch\var\log\procserver\ procserver.log should show you a similar entry like below, when you parse the file looking for the name of the Sharepoint server.

 

 

This entry will answer the question about if the Web Search Service application (FAST connector) is sending the data to the FAST server.

Other ways to troubleshoot you Web Search Service application (FAST connector) is my previous blog Troubleshooting the connection between the FAST Search server ContentDistributor and Sharepoint 2010

But it won’t help you in a Performance case.