RES Software User Group » PowerTrace

Got Skeletons?

Yuri Haak — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:35:53 +0000

A technote was published in the technote library in late March. This one will help you clean up any embarrasing log entries, which you need to clean out for one reason or another. Suppose you are running PowerTrace with WebTrace enabled in your environment and you or somebody else manage to surf to a webpage which everybody just rather forget about, then you need to find a way to surgically remove the skeletons from the closet, as you may want to retain the remainer of your PowerTrace logs.

In order to do this, you need to have the proper credentials for the PowerFuse datastore.

The article available here, will show you how to deal with this problem. A nifty buildingblock for Wisdom has also been included in the article.

Reducing the size of the PowerFuse database

Yuri Haak — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:02:45 +0000

A brand new article has been posted to the Technote Library. This time we’re diving into the PowerTrace tables. Being new to PowerFuse, some will be inclined to switch on everything, including PowerTrace turned to the Maxx, resulting in a potentially very unwanted huge heap of logdata and perhaps even a slow performing DBMS too.

This article explains how to both cure that situation if things have gone megabad, but also how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Click here to read the full article.

Zen and the Art of PowerTrace

Yuri Haak — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:22:44 +0000

A nice presentation shared by one of the friendly folks over at RES. This one is called Business Value of PowerTrace. It essentially shows you all the cool things which you can find out about your organization, using PowerTrace, a component of PowerFuse 2008 Enterprise edition. Please be sure to check the speaker notes on the PowerPoint, as there is a ton of valuable information in there. Some of the things you can discover are:

What’s a certain user been doing at a certain time?
Who’s been doing things they’re not supposed to do?
Who’s been editing a certain [type of] docment in a given department?
Web activity of a user or department
What’s the Top-10 usage of applications and websites?
What’s the daily maximum users on my terminal servers?

These and other questions are answered in the presentation. Enjoy:

PowerTrace DBsize Estimator

Yuri Haak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:12:06 +0000

This is kinda cool. This estimation tool will let you take a qualified guess at how big your PowerFuse database will be, approximatly. Now - before you jump in to it, here’s a brief reality check. The calculator only deals with the big tables in the PowerFuse datastore, namely the PowerTrace tables. These are the ones that matter when it comes to size. The rest of the database would rarely exceed 100 Meg anyway. Just to be clear, the following items are not taken into consideration:

Custom Resources
Uploaded .ADM files
Desktop and Screensaver bitmaps
Odd-sized icons
Other stuff you upload into the database.

The PowerTrace engine in PowerFuse will create database records the moment a user starts an application or launches a website. When the user closes the app or website, the record create earlier is updated with and end-timestamp. Each record created by PowerTrace is 512 bytes in size.

The calculator is an external spreadsheet stored at EditGrid.com, where one can make online excel calculators. Have a look at the calculator by clicking on the preview image below: