SharePoint 2010 Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application

Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application collects Data about Usage and Health of your farm. This information is used for Health Monitoring and this is also required for running the Web Analytics Service. If you do not have a Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application or your Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is stopped, you will not see any data in the Web Analytics Report. So, How do you create a Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application? Your natural instinct is you login to Central Admin -> Application Management -> Manage Service Application -> New

Guess What? You do not see a “New Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application”

So How do you do it? Well You can create it by following this Technet Article. You need to navigate to Monitoring, Click on Configure Usage and Health Data Collection, check the box for “Enable usage data collection”, select the Events to Log, Put in the log file location, SQL information and you are done. Now you have Health Data Collection Service Application but if you navigate back to Manage Service Application Section, you see that the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is Stopped.  How do we start? I will get there in a Minute.

You can also create Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application by using Power Shell, here is the Syntax for it. I love Power Shell, so this is my preferred method.

New-SPUsageApplication -Name “UsageAppName” -DatabaseServer “DBServerName” -DatabaseName “DBName”

Even if you use Power Shell to create the Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application, if you navigate back to Manage Service Application, you see that the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is Stopped.

So to Start the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy, use the Power Shell Command below

$Usage = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy | where {$_.TypeName -eq “Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy”}

$Usage.provision()

This should get your Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy started, hopefully you will find some peace!

 

New-SPUsageApplication -Name UsageName -DatabaseServer $databaseServerName -DatabaseName “UsageDB”