SharePoint 2010 Web Analytics showing user Display Name and Account Name from the same user

Question

Hi!

Since July, 16th 2012 the Web Analytics Daily Unique Visitors reports started to show almost the double of visitors we used to have on our Web Application. Here are some of the data (I intentionally deleted the weekend data):

10/7/2012 2.497
11/7/2012 2.723
12/7/2012 2.722
13/7/2012 2.699
16/7/2012 5.055
17/7/2012 4.963
18/7/2012 4.954
19/7/2012 4.998
20/7/2012 4.965
23/7/2012 5.117
24/7/2012 5.012
25/7/2012 5.071

As you may notice the data jumped from around 2.700 unique visitors to around 5.000 unique visitors. As the number of permissioned users remains constant it is pretty odd. I also checked the Number of Page Views report and see no change on its behavior. The number of page views remained constant.

So I went to look the Top Visitors report and understand why the visitors number almost doubled. The analytics started to count the users Display Name and Account name as two different visitors with a different number of page views. Let me show you an example from yesterday (July, 25th) Top Visitors report:

#     Visitor                  Page Views    %
1    Cinthia XXXXXXXXXX    359        0,55%
5    Giselle XXXXXXXXXX     143        0,22%
7    Aline XXXXXXXXXX       138        0,21%
15  nt\cmazevedo              111        0,17%
60  nt\gbsantana                 69        0,11%
73  nt\aglsiqueira                 65        0,10%

"Cinthia" and the account "nt\cmazevedo" are the same person. The same is applied to "Giselle" / "nt\gbsantana" and "Aline" / "nt\aglsiqueira".

As I stated this is an example from July, 25th. If I checked the same report from a period before July, 16th I can only see the users Display Name as "Visitors". No account name is displayed or counted as a different visitor.

About the environment:

We have two SharePoint 2010 farms: a "corporate" and a "enterprise". The corporate farm contains four web servers and a central administration servers with publishing services. The enterprise farm contains two servers running User Profile Services, Search Services and some others. Our main version is the SP1 with June/2011 Cumulative Update with a few more hotfixes applied.

This behavior on analytics is affecting all web applications (we have more than 20) installed on this farm and my company Support team said that no change were made on SharePoint on the weekend the problem started.

Does anyone have any tip about what is going on?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hi Fabio,

Thanks for your post.

I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue.

Best Regards,

Yaoyao Chen

Answer 2

Hello Fábio_Corrêa,

Thank you for your post. All the  Web-analytics  reports only Show the “Display Name” of the user by default .   But if the DisplayName is modified , you would see two entries for the user .

For the affected users please check if their Display Name was Changed in AD , which could be due to  Firstname/Lastname Changes  etc..  Have the User Profiles as seen in UPA Profile Page  also been changed /Affected ? If yes  I would suggest to look for  Changes in UPA which seems to be Published  in an  Enterprise  Farm & consumed  in Corporate Farm  & could have caused it

Thanks..

---

Regards,
Manas Biswas
Microsoft Online Community Support


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Answer 3

Thanks for your interest in this topic, Yaoyao.

I will reply to Manas (below) and share some new information. Maybe it can help you to help me. :)

Regards,

Answer 4

Hi, Manas!

First of all thanks for your interest on this issue but I don't think it is related to the User Profile or the Active Directory.

I checked both records and there was no change on the Display Names. All the users have "full names" as display names (first + middle + last name) and not logins as SharePoint is displaying on this report.

But I did a test yesterday and checked the results today confirming that just the access been made using a specific server are causing this. Explaining it better:

I have four web servers on my farm named from P01 to P04. Then I created this test script:

Step 1: Change local HOSTS file to point the web application on the server P01.
Step 2: Access site "A"
Step 3: Access site "B"
Step 4: Close the browser.

Step 1: Change local HOSTS file to point the web application on the server P02.
Step 2: Access site "C"
Step 3: Access site "D"
Step 4: Close the browser.

Step 1: Change local HOSTS file to point the web application on the server P03.
Step 2: Access site "E"
Step 3: Access site "F"
Step 4: Close the browser.

Step 1: Change local HOSTS file to point the web application on the server P04.
Step 2: Access site "G"
Step 3: Access site "H"
Step 4: Close the browser.

I asked three users to execute that script. The results: All access to the sites "C" and "D" were registered on Web Analytics with the user account name such as "nt\cmazevedo". All the other sites registered the user Display Name correctly such as "Cinthia XXXXXXXXXX".

With this test we could isolate the problem just on the server P02. It doesn't occur on the others. Now my support team is trying to find any configuration difference between this server and the other three that could point for the root cause.

I am also looking for some information regarding the service responsible for this task ("transform the account name into a display name") to understand why it doesn't work on one server and works on the others.

Thanks!

Answer 5

Hi Fábio_Corrêa ,

Thank you for the update. Can u check  what is the result when users Access Site A,B,E,F,G,H from server PO2  to Isolate  if this is an Issue Specific to Site C & D or Server PO2 .

Thanks..

---

Regards,
Manas Biswas
Microsoft Online Community Support


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Answer 6

Hi!

It is isolated on server P02. Every site we navigate using this server considers our account name as "Visitor" instead of our Display Name.

Thanks!

Answer 7

Hi Fábio_Corrêa ,

Thank you for the update. Additionally , You can looks at the “cs-username”  field in IIS logs to see  what is the details logged for the incoming request on a  working  & Problem  web front end ..  Were  you able to find any other differences ?

Thanks..

---

Regards,
Manas Biswas
Microsoft Online Community Support


Please remember to click 'Mark as Answer' on the post that helps you or click 'Unmark as Answer' if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Answer 8

Manas,

Sorry for the delay to answer your question. I am having problems to access Microsoft.com from my company. It looks like some proxy/firewall restriction.

I checked the IIS logs and didn't find any difference on it between the servers but the Support Team discover that this server didn't have a PATH variable defined on Windows.

It was fixed to look like the other servers and we are doing some tests to confirm if it was the problem. I expect to have the confirmation in a few days. I will let you know.

Thanks!

Regards,

Answer 9

All,

Just to confirm the solution, it was related to the absence of the PATH system variable.

Nobody was able to explain who and why it was deleted from the server but its re-creation solved the problem.

Thanks a lot for your support.

Regards,