Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online - new usage reports not populating
Hi Guys, Just saw Anne Michels' post on the new usage reports in O365. In particular the SPOnline bits. And while I get the summary graph on the Usage Reports homepage: I'm not seeing an...
OK, so I've been back and forth with support and it turns out, only Team Sites, Personal Sites and Group Sites (aka Team sites) are supported for the usage reporting.
What a waste of time! They've excluded all the other site types, which is just nuts. Why give stats on O365, only to exclude a potentially significant portion of the activity?
I see they've just anounced a invitation only preview of a usage reporting content pack for PowerBI (I've applied), but I bet it has the same restriction.
FYI 90% of the content on our site is based on Project sites or a custom site template derived from a Project site.
Should we be abondoning all site templates other than Team Sites? What's the plan here MS? You're making it harder and harder for IT Pros to deliver services on your products!
</rant>
Anne Michels
Microsoft
MicrosoftHi Craig,
the SharePoint usage reports are currently limited to only file activity for team sites and personal sites. We understand that this is an incomplete picture of activity in SharePoint and we're working on improving the report to include more information.
Thanks,
Anne
Thanks Anne, and thanks for following up on this for me.
It's just frustrating that a system that is touted as telling you what you're users are up to, doesn't. It just tells you some of what they're up to. An incomplete picture is worse than no picture at all, since it's misleading.
It means I'm going to have to come up with our own reporting system (which can't use PowerBI, because we pretty quickly hit Pro features, which means licensing issues), so we can deploy SPOnline based services to clients, which we'll likely throw out in the not to distant future, as the MS team catch up...
Any idea why it was limited to Team sites (plus Personal and Group Sites)? Because presumably the data is the same, regardless of the site type. Is it a data volume issue?
It's just frustrating that a system that is touted as telling you what you're users are up to, doesn't. It just tells you some of what they're up to. An incomplete picture is worse than no picture at all, since it's misleading.
It means I'm going to have to come up with our own reporting system (which can't use PowerBI, because we pretty quickly hit Pro features, which means licensing issues), so we can deploy SPOnline based services to clients, which we'll likely throw out in the not to distant future, as the MS team catch up...
Any idea why it was limited to Team sites (plus Personal and Group Sites)? Because presumably the data is the same, regardless of the site type. Is it a data volume issue?
- Anne Michels
Hi Craig, I wanted to follow up on your question. I've connected with the engineering team on this and they asked me to share the following with you:
Thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the frustration. We are working on being more inclusive, we will be tracking more events (page views) and will be tracking more sites. These additions will release once we feel confident that we are adding more good vs. under or over reporting and more confusion. We expect to add things gradually over the next two quarters, stay tuned for more communication in this area.
- Thanks Anne, that's great news.
BTW just got me acceptance email for the O365 Content Pack for PowerBI, so looking forward to seeing that in action (with it's currently limited subset of data) once it's been populated.
Thanks again Anne!
Craig
To my sounds very strange this current limitation and I subscribe all what Craig has said. Anne Michels is there any document where it's clearly described the information displayed on each report and what's it's not displayed...I think this document is requiered to meet customer expectations in regards of what current reports show
- Anne Michels
You can find supporting documentation on support.office.com. Here is the direct link:
Also, each report has a help link at the top that takes you to the related article. If you have feedback on the support documentation please let us know so that we can improve it.
Thanks,
Anne
The documentation says things like:
SharePoint in terms of the total number of files that users store in SharePoint, how many files are actively being used, and the storage consumed across all SharePoint sites.
which seems to indicate all sites, but apparently it's just Team Sites and Group Sites.
It also says:
You can view the report for All sites, or you can click the drop-down to select Team sites or Group sites. The All sites report summarizes counts for all Team sites and Group sites together. The Team sites report shows counts for only Team sites, and the Group sites shows counts only for Group sites.
which seems to indicate some separation and that "All sites" is actually just Team sites and Group sites.
Note: this drop-down is not available on the site usage graph, not the site activity graph
Plus I don't get the separation of Team sites and Group sites... Haven't MS recently announced that they are merging? They should just have a filter for site/site collection template...
I'm now at the point where I can't trust any of the reports, because the devil is in the detail. "All sites" does not mean all your sites. So what other data is missing from other reports?
e.g For Yammer it says:
All clients These reports aggregate data across all clients, including using Yammer in a browser or on an iOS or Android app.
<facetious>Yes it says "all clients" but given that it doesn't mention the Windows Phone client, does that mean it's not included?</facetious>
How do we trust these reports?
