Considering you have an advanced TFS installation such that the app tier and the data and reporting tier are spread across multiple servers and the data tier goes down because of a network failure. The below error message may seem familiar,
Team Foundation Services are not available from server xxx. Technical information (for administrator): Unable to connect to the remote server.
Now your first reaction would be to verify whether the TFS database is up, do you remember the database server name or connection string?
You can always turn to the TFS administration console to find out information related to the data tier, app tier, reporting tier, email alert settings, etc.
But in case of some problems if you are unable to access the TFS Administration Console to verify the data tier server, sql server instance and connection string details you can always retrieve these from the config file. Navigate to the IIS and expand the ‘Team Foundation Server’ web site, switch to content view and click explore
Clicking explore will open the Team Foundation Server content in the windows explorer and will let you browse through the binaries, open the web.config file
Look for the appSettings tag in the app.config, voila, the key => “applicationDatabase” is what you are after. This has the connection string to the TFS database.
Refrain from making any changes to the config files. Few colleagues changed the connection string in the web.config to repoint to a new database but this is not supported by Microsoft, best to use the TFS administration console.
Do you find the TFS Administration console useful for day to day administration of TFS?