The SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) is a simple command line executable that will scan the contents of your SharePoint farm to help identify the impact of migrating your server to SharePoint Online with Office 365.
Because the tool is designed to run without impacting your environment, you may observe the tool requires one to two days to complete a scan of your environment. During this time, the tool will report progress in the console window. After the scan is complete, you can find output files in the Logs directory. This is where you will find the summary and more detailed insights into the scenarios that could be impacted by migration.
The tool offers two modes; the default Assessment and Identity Mapping modes. I typically recommend starting with the Assessment mode to get a solid understanding of what issues come up prior to migration. Then you can run the Identity Mapping mode once most issues are corrected or mitigated prior to the actual migration.
Extract the file before running (I create a c:\SMAT folder and extract there to keep it simple)
The tool must run as the Farm service account. A farm administrator account is acceptable as long as the account has been given read access to all web applications. The account also needs explicit Full Control permissions on both Operations | Administrators and Sharing | Permissions on the User Profile Service Application. There are a series of checks to ensure the account has enough permissions prior to scanning the environment.
If the checks fail it will look similar to the below screenshot:
If any validation checks fail, do not continue to run the tool. Correct the issues reported, and run the tool again until it runs successfully without pre check warnings. The most common issue is the first message in the screenshot above. This simply means you are not using the “farm” service account which access to all components including SQL.
Execution
Once extracted you can run SMAT2010.exe for SharePoint 2010 OR SMAT.exe for SharePoint 2013 from a command line or launch from PowerShell as shown below. When all pre checks are successful the output will look similar to the cmd window below.
When complete, the program will prompt the operator to press Enter to continue. This ensures the operator is able to see the results in the console.
Log Files
You may see up to 3 log files in the output directory.
Log File
Description
SMAT.log
The SMAT.log file contains all the logging from the tool execution. This will contain 3 levels of logging. Information, Warning, and Errors. Information entries help track down progress and troubleshooting issues. Warnings are typically expected error conditions. Errors are unexpected conditions that our tooling was unable to determine if they will be a blocker to moving forward. These typically need to be investigated by someone familiar with the environment.
SMAT_Errors.log
The SMAT_Errors.log file contains only the Error events. If this file is missing after the tooling completes, it indicates there were no errors found.
SMATTelemetry.log
The SMATTelemetry.log file contains logging for the telemetry upload tooling. Any issues in here will not impact generating your reports.
Next Steps: Bring it all together with PowerBI
The output from SMAT can be compiled into a report that can be used to present the findings and highlight areas, sites, issues that need addressing before migration. I highly recommend following the steps Brian Jacket outlines in his articles that walks through exactly how to take the CSV files from the SMAT and transform them into an awesome PowerBI dashboard. By following his guidance, the following reports are possible.
Conclusion
If you are still hosting a SharePoint farm on-premises and are looking to migrate to SharePoint Online, the SMAT is the way to go.
Helpful Links
Here are some helpful links related to the topics covered in this article:
