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SharePoint 2010: How to Use Web Analytics

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You need to plan before you configure Web Analytics Service Application for SharePoint.

Why? The reason is simple, and Joel Oleson explains the reasons on this blog: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=515

The issues have not improved on SharePoint 2013. Check this out: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=655

My client obviously wanted to have Web Analytics to get information about their web pages when I was on vacation. So they configured the Web Analytics with a SharePoint Developer.

But they couldn’t open it because it was greyed out. So they thought everything went wrong and SharePoint isn't working, and they can’t get data …

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But you have to start first by adding the 2 services “manually”:

  • Web Analytics Data Processing Service
  • Web Analytics Web Service

 

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Second, you can get data/reports by:

  • Central Administration
  • Site Collection Settings

 

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These are the steps that occur:

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  • The user requests a page, and the action gets picked up by the Web Analytics service that runs on SharePoint.
  • The Web Analytics service logs this in the “.usage” files.
  • A Timer job called “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import” by default runs every 30 minutes. It imports the logs into the staging database.
  • Each night the “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Processing” Timer job runs and transforms the data into the reporting database.
  • The last run time of the import from staging and the aggregation is logged in the Settings table in the Reporting database.