SharePoint 2016: Most Popular Items returning 0 results (except for Homepage)

Question

Good day...

We have recently migrated from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016. The platform is largely stable now but an issue reported to us was the fact that popularity trends ('most popular items' for libraries) was returning zero results. Interestingly, for pages libraries, the homepage of any given site collection DOES return results accurately, but no other pages even though I know they are visited by hundreds of users daily.

An identical issue was reported here though for SharePoint 2013...

SharePoint 2013 Popularity trends mystery

This user was able to resolve the issue due to low diskspace on the app server. We checked our app server and found it to have plenty of space.

As best as I can tell, the timer jobs related to this are functionality and the create securities are granted for the search application.

Any direction would be appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

We found the solution...

In SharePoint, you can have Alternate Access Mapping, and you can have Server Name Mapping. If you are going to use them, you should use one or the other, not both.

For more information between the two, please consult this link...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/2010/05/28/server-name-mapping-and-alternate-access-mapping-aam/

In our case, we were using both. What ultimately fixed the issue is we removed the server name mappings, and ran a full crawl shortly after. As soon as the full crawl was completed, we were collecting data for all sites and files once more.