Monitoring Usage of Workstations with a Relational Database

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.