What is Site Usage?

Site Usage reporting is a service that enables site administrators, site collection administrators, and Shared Services Provider (SSP) administrators to monitor statistics about the use of their sites. Usage reporting also includes usage reporting for search queries that can be viewed by SSP administrators for search and site collection administrators.

SharePoint Out of box functionality and limitations

Site Administrators and Site Collection Administrators

•  Requests and queries in the last day and the last 30 days.
•  Average number of requests per day over the last 30 days.
•  A chart of requests per day over the last 30 days.
•  A list of the top page requests over the last 30 days.
•  A list of top users over the last 30 days.
•  A chart of top referring hosts over the last 30 days.
•  A chart of top referring pages over the last 30 days.
•  A list of top destination pages over the last 30 days.
•  Top queries for the last 30 days (if search usage reporting is enabled).
•  Search results top destination pages (if search usage reporting is enabled).

 Limitations o 30 days worth of data o Limited History o Pre-Defined look and feel o No customization available.

•  No easy way to access the backend data.
•  Hard to read log files to understand the data.

 

Overcoming the limitations

e Tek's Site Usage Solution

• Built on top of the out of box SharePoint Site Usage Logs. We haven’t invented the wheels
• Log parser to parse the Site Usage Logs and save it to the SQL Server Database - Smart Application that understands the log file syntax.
•  Web Service to provide information on the data. – Trying to hide the complexity of the database.
•  Consume the Web Service or connect directly to the database to report on the Site Usage.
•  Unlimited history of your data.
•  Build your own reports based on your own needs.
•  Save $$$...

Component of e Tek's Site Usage Solution

 Log File Parser

• Parses the SharePoint Log files into a normalized database format.
•  Scheduler runs every night to populate our database.

 Database

• Normalized SQL Server database that stores log information.
•  Stores the log history of the log files that have already been parsed.
• Stores the exception conditions that should not be part of the Usage Tracking.

 Web Service

•  Set of Methods to provide information on the audit logs and SharePoint Usage data.
• Can be consumed in Web Sites or windows applications or Reporting Applications.

Reporting Tool

•  Your choice of reporting tool that can consume Web Services / XML Data or can make direct calls to SQL Server Database.
•  Create your own reports and include it on SharePoint or on some other sites or even in a Windows Application.

Web Parts

•  Dashboard web parts with Charts and Graphs to represent the data.
•  Create your own web part based on the Usage data to display it for your end users.