Sharepoint Usage, Google Analytics

So up till now at my new job, i have been by far more concerned with making sure my sharepoint farm has 100% uptime, is stable, and well working. Now that things are actually configured correctly (for the most part) and are stable i am looking at how much the sever is being used, and how fast it is.

What i have found actually shocked me a little, and i have found a few bumps along the road.

I know you thinking, "hey doesn't sharepoint have built in usage logs?"
Yes, it does. Does it provide alot of information? No. Does it always work the way it is suppose to? Nooooooo.

My most recent experience has been with our new landing page push out. Avg hit was in the multiple 1,000 loads perday for the first week. When i noticed this pattern i started to look into "hey, can i cache the page more" and yes, you can. So i turned on page caching for the whole site collection and then the following week, looked at my usage logs and saw something disturbing.

My avg hits for the following week dropped to about 300, only thing that had changed was the cache. Not very happy with the information sharepoint was providing me anyways, i decided to look into other tracking solutions.

For the time being, not wanting to spend any money right away, i decided to look into Google analytics. In sharepoint it is pretty easy to set up, just edit the master page, throw the code at the bottom of it and your done. Almost.

There is a gotchya that GA has, you do need to have visitors hitting your site using the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) and you also have to set the default webpage. If you are using publishing features, that page is /Pages/default.aspx . Outside of that however so far it is providing me with all of the information i could hope for and is allowing me to have reasons to even upgrade (or try to) hardware in our server farm.

And no, you wont know it is working right away, you will know with in a few hours if the data is coming in (the x will turn to a check mark) and it will take a full day before you start to get any stats about your site at all.

There are other solutions out there, most notably CardioLog, but i did not want to go installing a software package on my production server just yet.

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