How to Manually Enable the Collection of SharePoint Usage Data

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box solution for collecting usage data. To get started, click the Monitoring link in the Central Administration consoleand select the Configure usage and health data collection option to bring up the Configure web analytics and health data collection page.Make sure the Enable usage data collection check box is selected, then choose the events you want to log (e.g., Page Requests). If PowerPivot for SharePoint is installed, make sure that all PowerPivot-specific logging events are also selected.

In the Logging Database Server section, enter the name of the instance and database where the usage data will be stored. Clicking the Log CollectionSchedule link in the Log Collection Schedule section brings you to a page in which you can configure (or optionally manually run) two timer jobs:

To understand how the logging database stores data, click the Monitoring link in the Central Administration console, select the View health reports option, and run one of the built-in reports (e.g., Slowest Pages) with SQL Server Profiler running in the background.I used this technique to build the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that display page usage for PerformancePoint Services (PPS) and ExcelServices. Much of the usage data is accessible through a view named RequestUsage.

See main article: Monitoring SQL Server and SharePoint BI Components