How to find the creation date of the Web Application?

Question

I wanted to find how the count of the web application in the farm increases in the past year.

For this I wanted to find out the date when each web application is created.

Is there anyway to find the creation date of the web application?

Answer 1

If you make an assumption, that the first site collection was probably added the same day the web application was created, you can run a powershell script to get all the dates that the site collections were created and look for the earliest date.

$wa = Get-SPWebApplication https://sharepointsitename.com
$sites = $wa.Sites

foreach ($site in $sites)
{
  $web = $site.rootweb
  write-host $web.Url, $web.created
  $site.dispose()
}

EDIT: the root site collection (the url that is displayed with the same url as your web application could also be a good date to use (assuming a top-level site collection was created and not skipped when creating the web application).

Answer 2

I think you could probably just look at the creation date of the files and directories in the virtual directory of the various webapps. I think web.config may get its date changed on some updates, but directories like bin should report the original creation date, I think. Probably not the most elegant way, but it is at least something.

Answer 3

I took a copy of sharepoint viewlsts.aspx and named it viewlstsedit.aspx to see the created date for every site and who created it . You can make the changes to the file and display the results as shown in diagram . For your requirement , on the similar lines take copy of WebApplicationList.aspx and make the necessary changes to WebAplicationEdit.aspx (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\ADMIN\WebApplicationEdit.aspx)