Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 15: Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 397
data and you want to conserve disk space, you can turn off data logging for
usage analysis.
■ Where the log files are stored and how many log files to create. By
default, the log files are in c:\Windows\system32\LogFiles\STS. Inside this
folder is a folder for every virtual server, and under those folders are folders for
each day. You can specify any other location you prefer. You can specify that
up to 30 log files are created.
Note If you choose a different log file location, you must be sure to give
the STS_WPG user group Read, Write, and Update permissions to the directory.
Without these permissions, the usage log files cannot be created or
updated by IIS. For more information about setting permissions for a directory,
see the Microsoft Windows Help system.
■ Whether or not to process the usage logs and when to do so. By default,
the log files are set to be processed every day at 1:00 A.M. You can schedule
the usage log to be processed at a more convenient downtime for your websites.
You can also specify the end time for the usage log processing. If your
websites are primarily used by internal employees, for example, you might
schedule the log to be processed at night, when demand on the sites is lower
than during working hours. If you have multiple servers, you can stagger the
processing. For example, you can configure the processing to start at midnight
and stagger it by 15 minutes so that server1 starts at 12:00, server2 starts at
12:15, server3 at 12:30, and so on.
In Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, usage analysis data is gathered
from the front-end Web servers and collected into temporary files. When the daily
log processing takes place, the data is merged into the content databases on the
back-end servers. Usage data is collected for an entire site collection on one server
at a time. Even though the data is logged and stored for an entire site collection,
when you view the data in HTML Administration pages, you can see only the data
for a particular website or subsite, not for the entire site collection.
Note Although you can see the total number of hits for a site collection on
the Site Collection Usage Summary page, for detailed information you must
use the Site Usage Report page for the individual site or subsite.
Usage data is kept for up to three months in the database for historical purposes.
Daily information is stored for 31 days, and monthly information is stored for