SharePoint Server 2016 Central Administration

Central Administration is a special SharePoint Web Application and it is automatically provisioned during the configuration of SharePoint through the SharePoint Product Configuration Wizard.

There should be a single central administration site for the entire farm, where farm administrators can manage the service applications, sites, securities and deployments. In SharePoint 2016, the central administration is categorized into ten sections and we will see summary about each of the item below,

1. Application Management, 2. System Settings, 3. Monitoring, 4. Backup and Restore, 5. Security, 6. Upgrade and Migration, 7. General Application Settings, 8. Apps, 9. Office 365, 10. Configuration Wizards.

The summary about each section of Central Administration is listed below,

Application Management: http://<servername:port>/applications.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there the administrators can manage the web applications, site collections, content databases, and service applications.

System Settings: http://<servername:port>/systemsettings.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there the administrators can manage the servers, services on server, features, solutions, email configurations, mobile configurations and farm-wide settings

Monitoring: http://<servername:port>/monitoring.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can track the jobs, view the reports, manage the logs, and view the health and status of your SharePoint farm

Backup and Restore: http://<servername:port>/backups.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can perform a backup or restore operations for Site Collections, sites, lists, or view history and status details

Security: http://<servername:port>/security.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can manage user settings, policy settings and general security settings.

Upgrade and Migration: http://<servername:port>/upgradeandmigration.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can view the status of upgrade, patch installation, database and also have the options for upgrade SharePoint, manage licenses, enable Enterprise features and more

General Application Settings: http://<servername:port>/generalapplicationsettings.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can configure general application and feature settings

Apps: http://<servername:port>/apps.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can manage and monitor your Apps

Configure Office 365: http://<servername:port>/office365configuration.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can configure settings to access or bind to the office 365 features

Configuration Wizards: http://<servername:port>/configurationwizards.aspx

This page contains the links to the pages, there administrators can use wizards to help configure advanced scenarios

Each section in Central Administration can do different operations and this feature of controlling the entire SharePoint Server is not available in SharePoint Online.