How to tell that a Continuous Crawl is actually working

One of the great things about having Continuous Crawl running is with the fact that it’s supposed to magically work, i.e you enable it and ‘mini-crawls’ are kicked off periodically keeping your index fresh.  However, it’s not very easy what’s happening in case something goes wrong or if you simply need to find out why a specific document isn’t searchable yet, since the crawl logs are aggregated over 24 hours for the Content Source.  This means that you can’t get information about each “Mini-crawl” from crawl logs themselves.

One way to see what’s happening is to take a look at the SQL table itself. The table is called MSSMiniCrawls and it resides in your SSA DB. This will at least provide you with information on when a specific mini-crawl has been kicked off or will get kicked off (based on the set interval) and can come handy if someone mentions that they’ve just uploaded a new document and are wondering when it will get crawled/indexed.

 

Each Mini-Crawl is recorded in this table and given a MiniCrawlID. If you have many Content Sources, it’s also easy to find out what the ContentSourceID correlates to via Powershell.