Usage and health service application data retention

Question

As per MS documentation "https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/administration/view-usage-reports", there are two types of data collected by the service and available to users in form of:

1. Popularity Trends
2. Most Popular Items

Documentation says that these reports show the data for the last 14 days and the counts for the last 3 years, monthly displayed.

My question is, do this information in analytics database is kept for only 3 years and then automatically erased ? I couldn't find any detailed info concerning the retention and the configuration of this period.

Additionally, which are the cases that will result into erasing this analytics data ? For example, I know one of them would be the search index reset.

Answer 1

SharePoint databases do not automatically erase data. They will need manual scaling if the databases are growing too large. You can see the document here: Database types and descriptions in SharePoint Server - Search service application databases.

SharePoint Server does not provide the ability to modify or configure this time range.

According to the document: Overview of analytics processing in SharePoint Server.

1. Usage counts are stored in the Analytics reporting database and additionally added to the items in the search index to improve search relevancy.
2. The usage events are stored temporarily on the web front end and are pushed to the Search Service Application every 15 minutes.

Every action related to Analytics Processing Component should affect the data from being processed into the reports. But the data does not actually get erased, we just cannot see it.