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SharePoint Online - new usage reports not populating

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Hi Guys,

 

Just saw @Anne Michels' post on the new usage reports in O365.  In particular the SPOnline bits.

And while I get the summary graph on the Usage Reports homepage:

Homepage.PNG

I'm not seeing any data in the drill-down:

SPActivity.PNG

20 Replies

Hi Craig,

thanks for letting us know. This is not expected and I've shared it with our engineering team. It's the first time I hear about this issue so could I also ask you to open a support ticket?

Thanks,

Anne

Even i noticed same issue.

Not seeing this problem on my tenants

Thanks for the response Anne.

 

I've logged a call and apparently an engineer is going to call me back.

 

Though I've also recieved an email, telling me that an onboarding expert from the FastTrack team is going to email me...

 

The race is on for the right person to make contact...

 

Thanks

Craig

:)

Thanks for the update, Craig. Please keep me posted.

Anne

Hey Anne,

just had two calls from the right support people. Apparently it's still being rolled out and all their own test tenants show the same issue.
So they've asked me to wait until Monday and see if it still isn't showing up. If not, they'll escalate at that point.

Thanks
Craig

Hi Craig,

could you send me your tenant ID via email (anne.michels(@)microsoft.com)? We'd like to investigate on our side.

Thanks,

Anne

best response confirmed by Matt_Nutt (Occasional Reader)
Solution

OK, so I've been back and forth with support and it turns out, only Team Sites, Personal Sites and Group Sites (aka Team sites) are supported for the usage reporting.

 

What a waste of time!  They've excluded all the other site types, which is just nuts.  Why give stats on O365, only to exclude a potentially significant portion of the activity?

 

I see they've just anounced a invitation only preview of a usage reporting content pack for PowerBI (I've applied), but I bet it has the same restriction.

 

FYI 90% of the content on our site is based on Project sites or a custom site template derived from a Project site.

 

Should we be abondoning all site templates other than Team Sites?  What's the plan here MS?  You're making it harder and harder for IT Pros to deliver services on your products!

</rant>

 

Hi Craig,

the SharePoint usage reports are currently limited to only file activity for team sites and personal sites. We understand that this is an incomplete picture of activity in SharePoint and we're working on improving the report to include more information.

Thanks,

Anne

Thanks Anne, and thanks for following up on this for me.

It's just frustrating that a system that is touted as telling you what you're users are up to, doesn't. It just tells you some of what they're up to. An incomplete picture is worse than no picture at all, since it's misleading.

It means I'm going to have to come up with our own reporting system (which can't use PowerBI, because we pretty quickly hit Pro features, which means licensing issues), so we can deploy SPOnline based services to clients, which we'll likely throw out in the not to distant future, as the MS team catch up...

Any idea why it was limited to Team sites (plus Personal and Group Sites)? Because presumably the data is the same, regardless of the site type. Is it a data volume issue?

To my sounds very strange this current limitation and I subscribe all what Craig has said. @Anne Michels is there any document where it's clearly described the information displayed on each report and what's it's not displayed...I think this document is requiered to meet customer expectations in regards of what current reports show

You can find supporting documentation on support.office.com. Here is the direct link:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Activity-Reports-in-the-Office-365-admin-center-0d6dfb17-85...

Also, each report has a help link at the top that takes you to the related article. If you have feedback on the support documentation please let us know so that we can improve it.

Thanks,

Anne

Thanks!! I will have a look...by the way: Is it the same limitation discussed about site reports in the coming Power BI Pack?

The documentation says things like:

 

SharePoint in terms of the total number of files that users store in SharePoint, how many files are actively being used, and the storage consumed across all SharePoint sites.

 

which seems to indicate all sites, but apparently it's just Team Sites and Group Sites.

 

It also says:

 

You can view the report for All sites, or you can click the drop-down to select Team sites or Group sites. The All sites report summarizes counts for all Team sites and Group sites together. The Team sites report shows counts for only Team sites, and the Group sites shows counts only for Group sites.

 

which seems to indicate some separation and that "All sites" is actually just Team sites and Group sites. 

Note: this drop-down is not available on the site usage graph, not the site activity graph

 

Plus I don't get the separation of Team sites and Group sites... Haven't MS recently announced that they are merging?  They should just have a filter for site/site collection template...

 

I'm now at the point where I can't trust any of the reports, because the devil is in the detail.  "All sites" does not mean all your sites.  So what other data is missing from other reports?

 

e.g For Yammer it says:

All clients    These reports aggregate data across all clients, including using Yammer in a browser or on an iOS or Android app.

 

<facetious>Yes it says "all clients" but given that it doesn't mention the Windows Phone client, does that mean it's not included?</facetious>

 

How do we trust these reports?

Hi Juan,

yes, the content pack is based on the reports from the admin center and thus the informaiton has the same scope. That being said, I've shared your feedback with the engineering team and they are currently looking into this.

Thanks,

Anne

Hi Craig,

first of all, thanks for the feedback. I've shared it with our engineering team and they are exploring options how to improve the report.

i've also shared your feedback with the documentation team and they'll be working on updating the articles.

Thanks,

Anne

Thanks Anne.

And I'm sorry that you've born the brunt of my frustration.

In the "race to the cloud", we're becoming increasingly frustrated with how incomplete many of these "Enterprise" solutions are.
While I can see that they're more than enough for startups and SMBs, the Enterprise story is often lacking - though you often don't discover this until you dot the i's and cross the t's - and makes it very difficult for us to provide complete services to our clients - minimum viable product is often not very minimal...

I know a lot of these things are on the road-map (https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap), but that too provides frustration, as there's a lot that happens that never appears on the road-map, or appears after it's happened.

Thanks again!
Craig

Hi Craig,

no need to apologize for any feedback at all. I appreciate very much you being so honest and open as well as taking the time to provide such detailed feedback. That's extremely helpful to us to improve the reports, documenation and information that we provide to make sure that it does really meet your needs.

@Brian Levenson is currently wokring on improving the roadmap as well.

Thanks,

Anne

Hi Craig, I wanted to follow up on your question. I've connected with the engineering team on this and they asked me to share the following with you:

Thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the frustration. We are working on being more inclusive, we will be tracking more events (page views) and will be tracking more sites. These additions will release once we feel confident that we are adding more good vs. under or over reporting and more confusion. We expect to add things gradually over the next two quarters, stay tuned for more communication in this area.

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Matt_Nutt (Occasional Reader)
Solution

OK, so I've been back and forth with support and it turns out, only Team Sites, Personal Sites and Group Sites (aka Team sites) are supported for the usage reporting.

 

What a waste of time!  They've excluded all the other site types, which is just nuts.  Why give stats on O365, only to exclude a potentially significant portion of the activity?

 

I see they've just anounced a invitation only preview of a usage reporting content pack for PowerBI (I've applied), but I bet it has the same restriction.

 

FYI 90% of the content on our site is based on Project sites or a custom site template derived from a Project site.

 

Should we be abondoning all site templates other than Team Sites?  What's the plan here MS?  You're making it harder and harder for IT Pros to deliver services on your products!

</rant>

 

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