How to Check SharePoint Usage Reports?

Read time 6 minutes

SharePoint Administrators occasionally require a comprehensive overview of site usage, including the number of users accessing, viewing, or editing site content. In the context of a sizable enterprise with numerous sites experiencing significant traffic, obtaining usage reports becomes essential for optimizing SharePoint resources.

SharePoint Usage Reports

The SharePoint usage reports provide insights into a user’s interactions with the site. When accessing these reports, you gain valuable information about daily and monthly site usage statistics, trends in popularity, frequently accessed items, and the frequency of users clicking on recommended results.

Because of SharePoint’s straightforward interface, accessing SharePoint usage reports and analyzing your site’s usage can be done easily through a variety of options. Below are some available methods:

1. Login to SharePoint using the Administrator credentials and go to Active Sites. Then select the site and click its URL.
   
2. After opening the site, you can click the Site contents tab to open the contents of the site.
   
3. Click the Site usage option from the toolbar.
   
4. There are multiple reports related to the site behavior using which you can get information on site usage. Here are some reports.
   • Unique viewers
     
   • Site visits
     
   • Site traffic
     
   • Popular platforms
     
   • Most unique viewers
     
   • Most viewed
     

If you are using the modern page layout of the site, then you can use the Site activity web part. The web part is the new part of the site activity on the modern page experience. The web part is easily accessible at any page for the recently modified content. When you click the Edit button at any site, then you can select any content and click the (+) icon to see various site features. Here, go to Site activity and click it.

On the Activity page, you can see the items in the chronological order of their editing. You should note that it works only for the modern web page but not on a classic web page.

Both of the aforementioned methods provide usage details for an individual site exclusively. However, with the current approach, you can monitor the activity of the entire site collection. It’s important to note that the current method is applicable exclusively to SharePoint on-premises. Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. At the Site Collection Administration, click the Site Collection Audit Settings.
2. At the Configure Audit Settings, check all the boxes whose report you want to get. Then click Next.
3. Choose among the various reports at the View Auditing Reports. There will be multiple categories where different reports are present.
   1. Content Activity Reports >
      • Content Viewing – The report consists of all events where a user viewed content on this site.
      • Content Modification – The report presents all modified content on the site.
      • Deletion – The report brings all events that caused content in the site to be deleted or restored from the recycle bin.
      • Content type and list modifications – The report shows all events that modified content types and lists on the site.
   2. Information Management Policy Reports >
      • Policy Modifications – The reports show events related to the creation and use of information management policies on content in the site.
      • Expiration and Disposition – The report consists of all events related to the expiration and disposition of content on the site.
   3. Security and Site Settings Reports >
      • Auditing Settings – The report consists of all events that change the auditing settings of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.
      • Security Settings – The report presents all events that change the security configuration of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

When you log in to the SharePoint Admin Center, you can see the SharePoint reports on Groups, Activity, Files, and Storage. You can click these reports and see their details.

You can see the reports in various formats and export them.

You can see the report in the tabular format also.

Conclusion

SharePoint is a big platform where the size of data is always large. So, its usage reports are important for administrators to have an insight into how data is being used. SharePoint Usage Reports bring some comprehensive details about data usage.