Usage analysis
From GTwM
This page is part of the agileBase documentation
GT portalBase keeps stats of every important action, like a login, record creation, report view, data edit or report modification. There are a number of places you can see this information.
As an administrator, there's an 'info' button in the toolbar that loads a fullscreen 'map' of all the areas of an organisation. Each report or view is a section of the screen - big areas for those that get a lot of use, smaller for those that don't. Colours give immediate feedback on whether it's usage is increasing (red = hot) or decreasing (blue = cooling). Hovering over an area shows more stats including the top users.
If you have many reports, you can zoom in on individual modules or sections by clicking on titles. Clicking on a report will load that report.
As one user said, "If I have understood you correctly you monitor the actual use of information? That seems like a very good idea to me as it is one of the ways to find out what information (in the system) actually matters most to the organization. That really helps setting priorities for future development".
For an overview of manager and admin activities as well as users', click the Administrator module and go to the admin dashboard. 'Sparkline' graphs are used to highlight particular types of usage in three areas - operational, tactical and strategic.
Finally, to see a summary of who's looking at a particular report, select that report's manage tab (you'll need MANAGE privileges). The stats button will show the last report view by each user together with a count of total views by that user. This is useful to see if reports are actually being used or whether they need to be altered or removed for example. Sometimes, agile development can create a glut of reports, some of which are eventually found unnecessary or become obsolete over time.
Similarly, you can see a summary for each table, to show details of who's looking at any report that draws data from that table.
Usage stats are kept for one year (more in backup).
Visualisations are created with two excellent libraries, the Javascript Infovis toolkit http://www.thejit.org/ and jQuery Sparklines http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/ both of which are available for use in any custom template plugins that may be created too.
