sitzmar! do what now?

lab usage stats

I'm not sure if I can take credit for the idea, as it was envisioned some time ago. Basically, each lab machine in the residential labs uses active desktop to display a small 'lab notices' page which allows us to easily post important lab related info, like when MyWestern goes down.

So this has been in place for some time, and works fine and dandy. The innovation came when we figured that we could easily adapt this to get near realtime stats on which machines were in use, and the duration that someone was logged in. This can help us monitor the labs for possible problems. Not that we don't actively check on the lab machines, but if we see a machine hasn't been used in a week, then its probably prudent to give it a quick checkup.

Last friday I had some free time so I put together a small php script that logs this info into a database, and a created a nifty color coded interface to view current machine usage. Once finals are done with I'll have time to start generating some pretty graphs, which should be quite interesting.