Requirement
Assume that you have recently launched new intranet portals and department sites in SharePoint online in your organization. You have announced it and asked everyone to start exploring it.
Now after a month or two, you want to understand the usage of these portals and sites. Are your employees really using the sites, how they are using it, what content is being watched more, which files and news are being watched more, which department users are more active on departmental sites etc.
You might need this information to enhance the portals and keep focus on certain types of data. This information will also help you to understand what needs to be done to keep employees engaging with the portals. You might want your employees to stop sharing files over emails, stop working on local office client’s software and start working on cloud platform on regular basis.
Solution
Let’s see how to gather such usage information from your SharePoint online site. SharePoint keeps track of all the information by default, we do not need to enable any service or feature. From day one it keeps track of each activity for every user.
There are two important sources to get usage data,
First
From Site Contents >> Site Usage Menu. (Site level usage report)
Using this option, you can get a usage report for an individual site. Open your SharePoint site >> from settings icon click on Site Contents >> the below screen will be shown >> Click on Site Usage link,
You will be navigated to a page with various charts and sections, below is the first section in the page which shows unique viewers by a specific period and site visit count for specific period. The chart also shows changes in trends, either it's increasing or decreasing as compared tothe prior similar period.
The next section on the page is Site traffic. This chart shows what is the time slot during the day when most of the employees access the portals.
The next section on the page is most unique viewers by pages/files and most viewed content in the site, either a news post or a file.
Second
From Microsoft 365 Admin Center (All SharePoint sites in this environment)
If you want to see usage report of all the sites in your tenant, you can get it from admin center. Navigate to admin center by clicking on the waffle icon as show below, expand Reports menu and click on Usage.
It shows usage of many different apps in your office 365 suite. Click on "Select a report" and choose Site Usage under SharePoint as shown below
This shows the number of active sites for the selected period. It has many options to see files, storage, and pages view for 7, 30, 90 and 180 days. In the same screen below, you can see a list of sites and page views with storage and file count.
If you want to see how many pages are being viewed across all SharePoint sites, then select Page option as shown below,
If you want to see how the storage is being used, and how the data is growing over the period across all SharePoint sites then you can see that report as shown below,
That’s it for this article. I hope this helps. Thanks for reading.