Usage Data - What makes a excel powerpivot? Can i generate usage data for "normal" excel services files?

Question

The usage data/reporting for powerpivot is really cool!

i wonder if there's a "trick" to use this infrastructure also for reporting usage of "normal" excel services files.
With "normal" i mean a excel files which is rendered by excel services and is not based on (external) data from powerpivot?

Background:
I have to create a "Report usage" analysis which shows all activity from SSRS, Excel Services Files and PowerPivot Files.
SSRS has executionlog, powerpivot has activity log, but for "normal" excel services files i have no idea where to get data from..

 

Cheers,
JJ

Answer 1

Hi JJ,

   "Usage" is a SharePoint feature which teams integrating with SharePoint can use. The PowerPivot team did so and generated data which we packaged as a cube. I don't believe that Excel Services integrated in any way with the SharePoint Usage infrastructure. Having said that, if your goal is to simply figure out how often a workbook is viewed, perhaps you could figure out how to track the activity of xlviewer.aspx (which is the page used to render workbooks). It won't tell you what people are doing (for that you would have to monitored their web service activity like ApplySlicerSelection and such), but it will tell you that the workbook was viewed. Possibly you could do this in an IIS module? One caveat is that we actually use this page to generate our snapshots so you might get slightly skewed data in relation to workbooks in PowerPivot Gallery.

   As to your "trick", like I said, they don't hook into usage and it is not supported for you to write code to call our apis to record usage of regular workbooks.

Hope that helps

Lee

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Lee Graber

Answer 2

Hi Lee,

thanks, i understand that usage logging is a sharepoint feature which powerpivot service application only uses..

So with the question: What makes a excel powerpivot? i mean what criteria uses the PP ServiceApp to know that its responsible?
Is it a special Content Type? Is it the "PowerPivot Data" Connection in a excel sheet which must be existent?

I assigned already the content type "PowerPivot Gallery" to a "normal" XL-document..but this doesn't seem to have any affect on powerpivot rendering/usage data, maybe the CT is as the name shows only for controling PPGallery appearance!?

I will try now to create "dummy"  PowerPivot Data in a "normal" excel file, will see if this trick works..

Cheers,
JJ

Answer 3

Ahhh,

   Now I understand the question. Our usage tracking hooks into calls to use our workbook as a data source. Hence, if you do not have "RefreshOnOpen" set and open a PowerPivot Workbook in Excel Viewer, you won't see anything show up in our usage logs. You have to do an action (like clicking on a slicer) which triggers us to access the embedded database for any tracking to occur. We do not track simple views of workbooks which have embedded PowerPivot data.

Does that help?

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Lee Graber

Answer 4

thanks, good information! so i will have to take a look at sharepoint general auditing features to get what i want: log of all "open" event for filetype xlsx