Diagnostic Guide for Usage and the PowerPivot Management Dashboard

Author: Ankur Goyal , Microsoft Analysis Service Test team

Part 1: Getting Started with Usage

1. When components within the various PowerPivot components decide to log “event” they call into the SharePoint Usage system APIs and Usage files are create to collect these events. This is a very high-throughput, low-overhead process since it is based on the OS Eventing system. Usage data files (.usage) gets collected in the SharePoint log directory (system drive->\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS). And by default .usage files get created every 30 minutes. To change the 30 minute interval, see below or a posting here: http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/01/18/how-to-manually-update-your-powerpivot-management-dashboard/ (for a general discussion around manually updating the dashboard).

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