What is active site analytics (ASA) ?

WebSphere Portal Server provides active site analysis (ASA) feature that you can use to collect the portal usage data and send it to some external web site analysis tool or your own tool to capture information on how your portal is used.

Portal also provides Server side analytics that can log your usage data in the NCSA format on portal server, but what if your using a third part tool like say Google Web Analytics or Omniture Coremetrics , or Adobe Active Site Analytics, in those cases it makes sense to use ASA feature.

The way ASA feature works is when your portal page is getting generated the theme and skin will produce some metadata information in the HTML and then you will use JavaScript code to collect that information and submit it to analytics site. The default theme has support to generate the metadata information and portal provides a sample JavaScript that you can use to collect and send information. Portal also provides some code/detailed information on how to integrate it with third part tools like Coremetrics, WebTrends, you can find samples on the Portal Wiki