One of my clients migrated from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013. We took all of the steps to migrate to 2010 then migrate again to 2013. Things went fine and dandy, but we hit some snags.
We had a limited hardware budget. One way to reduce costs was to re-use hardware as we migrated. Their SQL Server installation was in great shape, powerful and space to grow as we migrated. The only problem, it housed both production and a staging environment. This meant as we moved forward there could be 3 SQL instances with data at any one given time, and space got a little cramped.
One of the surprises I had was how much space is taken up by the Usage and Health application. It was undoubtedly the largest database in the instance; larger than any of our content databases. It probably grew so large based on our search configuration and the level of re-arangement we were performing as the site was migrated.
So, to limit data use, I put a hard size limit on the database. New data was flowing into the tables, but most of the sites were reporting zero activity. You may say that it could have been pretty accurate, but my client was concerned with the lack of data in reports.
My next step was to decommission the existing Usage & Health service, and create a new one. You can't do that through the user interface, so I did a little digging and came up with PowerShell commands to get everything going.
First off, allocate the new usage application:
New-SPUsageApplication -Name "Usage and Health Data Collection" `
-DatabaseServer "SQL2013"`
-DatabaseName "SP2013_UsageAndHealth"
I knew I had an alias on the server's instance but I couldn't remember it. I looked it up by checking a content database's info in the Application Management > Manage Content Databases section. I looked it up and it was SQL2013...
The next step was to provision the proxy, with some pretty stock settings:
$proxy = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy `
| where {$_.TypeName -eq "Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy"}
$proxy.Provision()
In some other blogs, it says we need to start the service on the individual server, but it's not showing up in my Services on Server list. I double checked a system that I know is working fine, and it's not listed in the Services on Server configuration page ether; so I think I'm good to go. I'll update with any changes as we go.
