Monitoring Usage of Workstations with a Relational Database
Jon Finke
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Abstract
The ability to monitor usage of groups of workstations is quite useful
for planning growth, facility hours, staffing and other issues; but in
our case, both the format of the data (/var/adm/wtmp) and the fact
that the data was spread over hundreds of different workstations made
any analysis difficult at best.
In this paper, we explore the use of a relational database to collect
all the raw data, convert it to a standard form, and then provide
selection tools to extract data sets. We also examine some ways to
process session data to provide more meaningful reports and charts for
administrators.
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