Thursday, May 16, 2013

Viewing web analytics reports in SharePoint 2010

Viewing web analytics reports

Web analytics reports are an innate part of the SharePoint 2010 installation. These reports are prebuilt. They use collected data from the active SharePoint installation to present information such as number of site collections, top destinations, top pages, page views, and top referrers. Using this information, an administrator can determine the flow of traffic. This is information that will comprise part of the story for performance monitoring.
This recipe shows how to invoke the reports and how to view custom reports.
In this recipe, we will modify one of the existing health analyzer rules.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.

How to do it...

  1. Open up the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration website.
  2. Click Monitoring.
  3. Under the Reporting section, click View Web Analytics reports.
  4. Choose a web application by clicking on it.
  5. The page that is presented contains a left-hand navigation, as shown here:
    SharePoint 2010 Monitoring and Reporting
    Click any of the above options and you will be presented with the appropriate report. When the report is presented, it is shown as a graph at the top and a grid at the bottom.

How it works...

The reporting data is collected by the usage data per web application, per site collection, per site, and finally, per search service application. The web analytics timer job runs as per its schedule and updates the collected information. This recipe showed how to access the reports through Central Administration. They can also be accessed through the site collection and sites via the Site Actions drop-down list.
Web analytics is now part of the services infrastructure. It is called the Web Analytics Service Application. This must be provisioned and configured similar to setting up the other services.
The following diagram shows the infrastructure components of the Web Analytics Service Application:
SharePoint 2010 Monitoring and Reporting
The information is collected on the web front-end (WFE) servers into .usage files. Timer jobs kick off a process that pulls the information into a staging database, where information is kept for 24 hours. Information is then aggregated into the reporting database, where it is retained for a period of 25 months by default.

There's more...

The data shown with date ranges can be modified. This can be achieved by clicking on the Change Settings link above the graph:
SharePoint 2010 Monitoring and Reporting
The following ribbon appears:
SharePoint 2010 Monitoring and Reporting
With a click of the appropriate date button, the data will be filtered. Depending on the report, there may be filters other than date.
Finally, the report can also be customized or exported to Excel. This can be done with the help of the two buttons on the right-most side of the preceding screenshot.

More info

Customized reports are also possible. There is an Administrative Report Library in Central Administration. There are folders in that library that contain reports written by someone in the organization. These reports may be particular to an organization's needs or audit concerns, among other things.
There is a Customized Reports link on the left-hand navigation shown in a preceding screenshot; currently, there is only Search Administration Reports in there.

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