monitoring PC utilization

[andyturpie]

Afternoon all,

 

Just wondering if there was software to monitor our workstations utilization, we are halfway through a "refresh" lease period and would like to see just how many of the machines are being used (if at all in some offices). Just something that would report back say a percentage of utilization on a regular basis so we can either say that next refresh certain zones don't require workstations or certain areas require extra etc.

 

Not fussed as to what machines are being used for, just the duration throught the school day if possible?

 

Cheers in advance -AT

[john]

You don't have Impero do you? It has some cool graphs to help with this

[mikeyd101]

I've been looking at custom solution for pulling stats from multiple machines as part of a bigger inventory gather / monitor project i'm working on using powershell.

 

You can do it with WMI and you can pull pretty much any information that you want with prefmon as well as bios/network configuration etc. My plan is to pull the information in powershell and generate some nice charts using the microsoft chart controls. As well as being able to query non monitored machines (cached) or generate custom reports (things like all machine serial nos, or mac / ip address lists)

 

In Powershell you can do something like:

 

Get-Counter -counter "\memory\available mbytes" -computer

 

more info on the power of get-counter Get-Counter

 

I have started putting pieces of it together, I have remote scraping of inventory info working (bios,network,os,software using a custom mof) to csv files and i've got some generated charts working from counters, but nothing like an end solution atm.

[Edu-IT]

Doesn't answer your question but these guys have a great system for just this! Shame they've not shared it.

 

Computer Availability App is here! | Web Services

[andyturpie]

Thanks for the responses - will look into all of the above - cheers!

[sonofsanta]

Overkill if you don't already have it, but if you do - a FOG server will tell you this as well.

[ADMaster]

Hello,

Are these workstations logged on with a generic account or does each student log on when they use the computer?

 

If it is the latter, look at a log on tracker. There are a few on here, from writing to a text file on a share, to a SQL database with web interface.

 

The basic log on, log off times should give you the info you’re after.

 

Regards,