Document usage reporting in SharePoint 2010

Question

I have a document repository in SharePoint 2010, and I would like to be able to report on what documents are most/least frequently viewed/downloaded/etc. I understand that item-level auditing may be one approach for viewing some reports on usage (although there is not a lot of documentation on item-level auditing, and the auditing will not report on documents that are not downloaded or used).

So... two questions:

1. Are there any good resources for documentation on item level auditing?
2. What other approaches work for reporting on usage of a document repository so that decisions can be made about what should be updated/deleted/retired/etc?

Answer 1

Yes you could enable audit policies, but another option is to take advantage of the Usage and Health service that collection information into a seperate database. This is in fact the only database that you are allowed to do selects from directly.

Read more on technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748636.aspx#section3