Experience Analyitcs and Rebuilding Reporting Database (Part 1)

There is a very interesting feature in sitecore that everybody should make use of. Users need to check out some reports that analyze the ways that contacts engage with their website. 

What is Experience Analytics?

Experience Analyitcs dashboard provides reports for marketers and marketing analysis to identify patterns in experience data that is collected from the website.

Rebuilding Reporting Database

Sometimes users need to upgrade from older sitecore versions to newer ones. Therefore, merging historical data from earlier versions of Sitecore with live xDB data is essential to make all the data available to Sitecore reporting applications. This process is called “rebuilding the reporting database”.

To ensure that the reporting database has all the latest changes, you need to rebuild from time to time.

I have gone through this experience and faced a lot of issues during this process. Sometimes the rebuild process gets interrupted due to several reasons.

One of the main things to know if there are any errors that caused this interruption is to go through the log files to see if there are any errors. In order to know if the error is related to processing pools, you should perform the following steps to enable the errors being registered in the log files:

1. In Sitecore.config file, set the log4net logging level to DEBUG in the <log4net> node:

2. In Sitecore.Analytics.config file, set the "Analytics.LogLevel" setting value to Debug:

3. Start the rebuild, wait until it is finished, and then check out the sitecore log files to                         see if there are any errors caused.

The Debug log level adds additional information about the agents/history tasks to the log files, so it should help identifying the step where the rebuild is failing.

Next part, I will tackle some issues that need to be checked and fixed if your rebuild process did not go through. Let's continue!