Measuring SharePoint Traffic

Stumbled upon a post I wrote on the newsgroups that others might find helpful. The question was roughly:

I'm using FP 2003 to generate the usage statistics every month, but I doubt the accuracy. Files in the same doc lib all receive nearly the same counts, and all have 145 hits every day even during holidays when no one is in the office. 

The answer:

I'll prefix this by saying that I haven't used FPs stats features, this is more of a "what I did to measure traffic." 

For one, I wrote custom routines to generate statistics against the IIS logs with filters on the column which contains the username to only include live users, not the service accounts. An added advantage was being able to relate this to a user roles table (which, at that org, were kept in a table used to track accounts, configurations, physical assets, etc.), and that let me see which managers, champions and end-users were making use of what resources. 

I found that links were being generated in different ways depending on context. Sometimes a path to an .aspx is referenced, sometimes the target will be a .dll with parameters. This prevents many logging apps from recording accurate stats. 

There are great lessons to be learned when you understand how people use your site, so start by setting a few goals (how many users read the "Message from the President" each week?), import your IIS logs into a database - MS Access will do - read through to see how it all works and start writing simple queries to get at what you want.