After installing SharePoint Diagnostic Studio 2010 (SPDiag 3.0), you might see three different Timer Jobs failing as you can read on Kirk Evans blog.
The error in the event log is
You do not have permission to run 'SP_TRACE_CREATE'
and
You do not have permission to run the RECONFIGURE statement
Two options are suggested. Either to disable the jobs or add the farm account to the sysadmin or sqladmin database server role.
As I don’t want to disable the Timer Jobs and also don’t want to give the farm account sysadmin rights, I instead granted the permissions the jobs actually needs and nothing more.
So, my solution is to grant the farm account ‘Alter settings’ and ‘Alter trace’ from the Permissions page under Server Properties.
You also might want to take a look at the Known issues for SPDiag on TechNet.
Many have had problems provisioning the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010, including myself.
My Powershell script failed and afterwards trying to manually create a User Profile Service Application in CA, I got the following error
An object of the type Microsoft.Office.Server.ActivityFeed.ActivityFeedUPAJob named "User Profile Service Application_ActivityFeedJob" already exists under the parent Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileService named "". Rename your object or delete the existing object.
Sounds like a Timer Job, so I wanted to take a look at the job definitions.
But now I got a "Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object".
OK, so I clearly needed to cleanup the Timer Jobs related to the User Profile Service. To do that I executed the following Powershell command.
Get-SPTimerJob | where {$_.name -match "User Profile Service*"} | % { $_.Delete()}
Now I was able to both review the job definitions and provision the User Profile Service Application successfully.