Troubleshooting My Site Creation in SharePoint 2013

I've seen a few examples - some myself and some from others - of issues getting My Sites created in beta 2 of SharePoint 2013. It can be a little tough to track down, because we use a queued approach now to creating personal sites, so you need to do a little digging to track down what's going on. If you do some snooping around the ULS logs, you'll see that creation of personal sites are managed by a timer job, which ends up being the "My Site Instantiation Interactive Request Queue" job. There is one per web application, so there's basically a three part process you want to go through:

  • Visit the My Site host, which by default should add an item to the timer job queue if your personal site doesn't exist yet.
  • Go to the timer job page and find the appropriate My Site creation job for the web application on which your personal sites are hosted.
  • Run the timer job, and then look in the ULS logs for items with the category "Personal Site Instantiation".

I followed this methodology to track down an issue that's been plaguing me for a few weeks, and was subsequently able to resolve it.