Chromebook "Recent Users" list

[plumyeti]

Hi,

 

Does anyone know how accurate the recent users list is in Google Admin?

 

It's showing me left (suspended) students, are the most recent users. I know they're not!

[Chris_Cook]

There is an activity log at the bottom of the device page that is more accurate (and doesn't match up with the recent users list). It seems like this needs a fairly recent version of chrome os on the device (since about christmas).

 

I ignore the recent users list now as I don't think its been updated for some time.

[plumyeti]

It seems I don't have access to this .

[jthompson]

I think the new, more detailed sign-in logs are part of the security centre, which isn't available on the Fundamentals edition iirc. They're pretty new still, not long out of beta.

 

Just looked at a couple of our devices and the recent users list does not match up with the recent device event logs any more. We've been using a custom Chrome extension to log which users have been using which devices.

[dgsmith]

Glad I saw this as I have wondered for the past few months why our recent users list shows students who left many months ago, on devices used frequently each day by multiple students. I have pretty much given up checking it but it was useful when it worked. We don't have the activity log either.

 

@jthompson: What is the extension you are using, is it free and does it do a reasonable good job of tracking activity?

[jthompson]

Yes, we managed to do it for free. It's one that we wrote ourselves, so isn't available in the Chrome Web Store. It's been working really well, but has a faily convoluted setup. At the time, when the new Google Admin logs were still in beta, our system was reflecting sign-in activity more promptly than Google Admin, so it felt more reliably complete.

 

The extension is force installed for our student users. It grabs the user name and device name, makes an API call to an AppSheet app to log username, timestamp and device name into a Sheet. Each time a log entry is added, the AppSheet app will call a separate Apps Script function which writes those details into log files stored in a Shared Drive (one log file per user and one log file per device). The Sheet also has an embedded Apps Script function which clears out all of the days' log entries each night, since there's a 10k row limit and the Sheet can fill up quickly. The log files in the Shared Drive therefore give us a deeper history for each device and each user.

[jthompson]

I'll see if it's in a shareable state, since it sounds like the new Google logs aren't available to all.

[TwistedHelixis]

So have Google deployed a system that needs a paid subscription, but also killed the version that did work under the free fundamentals subscription?

 

Is that legal?

[PotNoodleTech]

So have Google deployed a system that needs a paid subscription, but also killed the version that did work under the free fundamentals subscription?

 

Is that legal?

 

Yes basically. The auditing we get on the free version isn't fit for the purpose of education.