Monitoring your Oracle Cloud Users
It’s not particularly easy to tell exactly what your users are up to in Oracle Cloud.
- If you’ve enabled auditing and written some audit reports you can see the changes users have made
- You can query a couple of tables to retrieve a user’s last logon date
- You can download the RUEI reports from the Cloud Console which give you summary PDFs (which have some useful stats, but you can’t really do much with it other than screenshot the graphs)
Each gives a partial picture, but I’ve always hankered for a little more. I do have a good solution – which I’ll write about soon – but it’s a paid service. I was intrigued recently when I saw the announcement for a free alternative. It was described as:
A free user behaviour analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website through features such as session replays and heatmaps.
This sounded promising so I thought I’d give it a try. I set it up and then waited a couple of weeks for a representative amount of user activity to accumulate.
Dashboard
The first thing you see is the Dashboard. This is live data – we don’t have to wait for the following day or week to get the info. Across the top you can see session info – so 3,132 sessions from 957 distinct users with an average session length of ~30 mins (of which just under half was active time).
Then you get a series of donut charts and lists showing the proportion of sessions which have encountered problems, the most popular pages, browsers, OSes etc. What I like most is you can filter and drill into this data – so you can find answers to questions such as:
- Are all the JavaScript errors encountered by a specific browser?
- Which pages are the source for the most rage clicks (where someone repeatedly spams a button or field)?
- Are users really engaging with the system on mobile devices, and is this level of uptake the same across all countries?
This is great, and the service also offers Heatmaps and Session Recordings.
Fusion Tipster 