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If you want to know what kind of impact your Web site has, you need to track how many users visit your site, the type and number of hits your site receives, and other site-usage information. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services includes features that analyze the usage of your site. Summary and detailed usage reports supply information such as the following:
Tracking usage information can be useful for identifying which content on your site is being heavily used (and therefore should be kept) and which content is not being heavily used (and may be a candidate for archival). In addition to site usage statistics, you can keep track of how much storage space your site is taking up and the level of activity that your site is generating. This information is gathered as part of the quota tracking for sites. For more information about quotas, see Manage site quotas and locks.
The usage reports rely on usage log data gathered from the Web sites and stored in the content database for each virtual server. The log data is a summary record of transactions on your Web site. When you view a usage report, the data is arranged into a list format. You must be a member of the Administrator site group (or have the View Usage Data right) for a site to view the site usage statistics.
You can view summary data about a site from the Site Settings page.
You configure the settings for processing the usage log by using commands in HTML Administration pages. From the SharePoint Central Administration page, you can control the following:
Usage analysis is not enabled by default. If you want to use the usage analysis features for your server, you must enable the usage analysis logging process. Log files are created daily to track usage information. When the log file is processed, a flag is added to indicate that is has been processed. If you do not want to track usage analysis data and you want to conserve disk space, you can turn off data logging for usage analysis.
By default, the log files are set to be processed every day at 1:00 A.M. You can schedule processing of the usage log at a more convenient downtime for your Web sites. If your Web sites are primarily used by internal employees, for example, you might schedule the log to be processed at night, when demand on the sites is lower than during working hours. If you have multiple servers, you can stagger the processing. For example, you can configure the processing to start at midnight, and stagger it by 15 minutes, so that server1 starts at 12:00, server2 starts at 12:15, server3 at 12:30, and so on.
By default, the log files are in c:\%windir%\system32\LogFiles\STS. Inside this folder is a folder for every virtual server, and under those folders, folders for each day. You can specify any other location that you prefer.
Note If you choose a different log file location, you must be sure to give the STS_WPG user group Read, Write, and Update permissions to the directory. Without these permissions, the usage log files cannot be created or updated. For more information about setting permissions for a directory, see the Microsoft Windows Help system.
In Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, usage analysis data is gathered from the front-end Web servers and collected into temporary files. When the scheduled log processing takes place, the data is merged into the content databases on the back-end servers. Usage data is collected for an entire virtual server at a time, even if you have separate top-level Web sites on a virtual server. When you view the data in HTML Administration pages, you can see only the data for a particular Web site or subsite, not for the virtual server or the entire top-level Web site and any subsites together. For more information about the type of data gathered in the usage analysis logs and how to view the usage analysis reports, see Analyze Web site usage.
Usage data is stored for 31 months. Daily information is stored for 31 days. The log files will not be deleted, even after processing. Note that usage analysis processes rely on the Microsoft SharePoint Timer service to manage the timing of log processing. For more information about the SharePoint Timer service, see Schedule timed jobs.
You control settings for usage analysis processing from the SharePoint Central Administration page. You must be an administrator of the local server computer or a member of the SharePoint Administrators group to configure usage analysis settings.