Thoughts on Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 - Part 1

[Christopher Weaver]

First published on TECHNET on Nov 15, 2012

Web Analytics data collection is actually driven by the Usage and Health service, and then it mines the data to help administrators improve their Sites and Search.

To collect data the Usage and Health Service, aggregates the info thru Usage definitions which you can see  in Central Admin.

1. Sandboxed Requests

1. Content Import Usage

1. WorkFlow

1. Clickthrough usage

1. Content Export Usage

1. Page Requests

1. Feature Use

1. Search Query Usage

1. Site Inventory Usage

1. Sandboxed Requests Monitored Data

1. Timer Jobs

1. Rating Usage

Using the Web Analytics Service these results are aggregated into reports at these levels

1. Web Application

1. Site Collection

1. Site

1. Search Service Application

By Default we have the following reports

1. Traffic Reports - How many hits a page got, How the user got there, and What browser they used to get there.

1. Search Reports - What was searched for, top clicks, failed queries, etc

1. Inventory Reports - What space is being used by who, How many sites you have, What languages those sites use, etc

You can manipulate the Usage Definitions using the PowerShell commands

Get-SPUsageDefinition

Set-SPUsageDefinition

Thoughts and Suggestions

• You can set the retention rate for each Usage Definition, I would recommend you leave it at 14 days.

• There is no way to log extra data for Web Analytics out of the box, but you could create a custom usage receiver by following this blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tejasr/archive/2010/12/26/customizing-web-analytics-in-sharepoint.aspx

• If you’re interested in monitoring server performance we may want to look at this http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2009/10/27/adding-throttling-counters-in-sharepoint-201...

• As well you can create your own reports by using SharePoint SQL Reporting Services against the Logging database, or 3 ^rd party tools that mine the data for you.

Articles

Capacity requirements for the Web Analytics Shared Service in SharePoint Server 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg440601.aspx

Reporting and usage analysis overview (SharePoint Server 2010)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg266383.aspx

Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010: Insights into Reports and Metrics

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/05/03/web-analytics-in-sharepoint-2010-insights-into-repor...