Gather stats from SharePoint

I was not actually looking for this, but that does not mean it is not incredibly useful.

I was actually looking for what was available from the PerformancePoint Team blog in the way of updates to the SDK documentation, or heck, an SDK versus just a single page in the MSDN canon, when I came across this code sample posted on code.msdn.microsoft.com (what the real difference between this site and codeplex.com is, I do not know, but it gets confusing having both).

This code sample, titled "Gather information from SharePoint to a database for reporting", does not come with a lot of documentation or instruction, but by odd coincidence, it seems I found this on its publishing day – today, May 11. The code sample consists of two parts, the C# console app project and the database.

To get this tool up and running:

• Download the project file for the app and the database
• Unless you are in France or have French collation set up on your server or personal machine, I would recommend hand editing the script to remove that language collation……………Or just do what I did and create a database called Stats and used the BAK file included to restore to (the DDL does not have any table create scripts?)
• Start up VS 2008 and open the unzipped project. From here you can either compile so you have an executable or debug through it and watch it run

One important note: This app is not yet configured for remote execution, so it has a dependency on being run directly on the SharePoint server in order to gather stats. SQL Server configuration is just a connection string in the app.config, so that can be a different box/remote server.

This handy little app produces quite a few usage statistics on a SharePoint farm, with the most rich being at the site level. Be interesting to see where this goes next, I have no immediate need for it, but I figured it is interesting enough of a find to post and share!

May 11, 2009 20:23 by Sid
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