Essential Steps for Getting Started with ActivTrak

Welcome to your new ActivTrak account! You’re on your way to gaining all sorts of invaluable organizational insights, backed by your own data. Setting up ActivTrak is straightforward, but it's even easier to get started by following this guide of essential account setup steps. If you need additional help, feel free to reach out to our Support team at any time.

1. Download & Install the ActivTrak Agent 

The entire data cycle begins with the ActivTrak Agent. Without at least one installed Agent, ActivTrak is unable to collect and analyze any data.

Downloading the Agent is simple. When you first log in to your ActivTrak account, you will land on the Agent Activation page, which includes links to install the Agent on your own computer and to share the installation file to install Agents on other devices.

When installing on your own device, the app detects your workstation’s operating system and automatically pushes the appropriate Agent version. When sharing the installation file, you will be prompted to select the operating system for the device where the Agent will be installed.

You will see the Agent Activation page each time you log in until you have deployed at least one Agent.

You can also download and install an Agent at any time from the ActivTrak Dashboard by clicking the blue "Download Agent" button in the upper-right corner of the screen. This will initiate the download process. The app knows what operating system you're on for that workstation, and will automatically push the correct Agent for you to download.

There are multiple methods of deploying the Agent on another workstation. See our Deploying Agent Guide for instructions on each option.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please ensure that you place the ActivTrak Agent on the whitelist of your antivirus and/or firewall so that your Agent does not get blocked. Failure to do so tends to be one of the major reasons new users experience Agent issues. Click here to follow a step-by-step guide on how to place your Agent on the whitelists.

2. Create User and Computer Aliases

Change the viewable name of a computer or user with an alias. When the agent is installed on a computer, it shows the registered name of the computer on all associated computer data. You can also use aliases to change the names of users in reports and combine variations of user names into a single alias.

Article: Change and Create Aliases

3.  Organize Users Into Groups

Groups allow you to group monitored workstations together and segment data any way you’d like. Each workstation in a group can still be accessed and viewed individually, but groups allow you to aggregate, segment, and analyze specific clusters of data together.  

Article: Creating and Managing Groups

4.  Assign Applications and Websites a Productivity Label & Category

ActivTrak's Intelligent Auto Classification feature uses crowd-sourcing and will automatically classify most of the websites and applications that the majority of customers use with a productivity label and a category. 

You can also customize productivity assignments to websites and applications and label each as productive or unproductive. Both types of classifications are essential to ensuring your reports reflect how users spend their time. 

ActivTrak offers a pre-built library of common descriptive categories with applications and websites classified accordingly. You can also customize this list to suit your needs. Categorization allows for a better understanding of how various types of applications and websites are utilized.

Article: Categorize a Website or Application

5.  Create Custom Tracking Schedules 

Set up scheduled monitoring hours for users to reflect their working hour schedules. This allows for collecting user activity data only during working hours and prevents unnecessary data collection outside of the workday.

Article: Use the Scheduling Feature to Reflect Employee Working Hours

6.  Create Alarm Triggers and Actions

All reactions to user activities are triggered by alarms. As the ActivTrak Agent runs in the background, it’s capturing a user's actions to match specific criteria configured by an account administrator. When these predefined conditions are met, the ActivTrak agent triggers a reaction on the user's machine or in the ActivTrak dashboard.

Article: Creating Custom Alarms

7.  Explore the Dashboard 

The ActivTrak dashboard displays key summaries of the extensive and more detailed reports available in other areas of the app. If you just want a quick snapshot of your organization, the dashboard is the place to go. 

Article: Navigating the Dashboard

8.  Review Individual Reports

Multiple analytical reports help you discover valuable insights and increase team productivity. All reports contain powerful filters — some universal, some report-specific — to help you discover trends more quickly.  

Article: ActivTrak Reports