How to Use ActivTrak to Find Application Usage

ActivTrak is able to tell which employees are using what software, and for how long. This can help managers determine where time is being spent while also showing if they are getting a good return on potentially expensive software licenses. This article details the different ways to review this data through ActivTrak.

In-App:

ActivTrak offers two reports for looking at the tools being used by your employees, Top Applications and Top Websites. Due to the increasingly online nature of workplace software, it is important to look at both of these categories, as many applications are not downloaded onto a workstation, but rather a website that your employees will log into. Anything that has been set to the “Ignore” Category inside Settings > Categorization will be excluded from these reports. You can read more about this feature here.

Top Applications:

Description- This report will show you which workstation-based applications are being used by your employees, what percentage of time spent in application-based tools are spent in each one, and the total duration of each item.

Where- Login to the dashboard and navigate to the sidebar. Click on "Live Reports" then "Top Applications"

How to Use-

• Filter by a specific time, user, or group

• The applications are broken up by OS. Front for example shows “Front.exe” for PC’s and “con. front app. Front” for Macs

• Click on an Application on the left side of this report to display more information on the right side

• Usage: gives a breakdown of user usage of an application by day. It shows which days and for how long the selected app is being used by your team

• Users: will show how long each specific user has used the application and color code depending on how their usage compares to their peers. It also indicates which part of the day the user is spending the most time inside the application

• Titles: provides insight into the title bars inside the application being used

• In Top Applications, browsers are specifically excluded from this list as it is understood that while Chrome may be the most used application, it is much more valuable to see what they are using Chrome to navigate to.

Top Websites:

Description- Just like with Top Applications, the Top Websites report will show you how much time your users are spending on web activity.

Where- Login to the dashboard and navigate to the sidebar. Click on "Live Reports" then "Top Websites"

How to Use-

• As with Top Applications, this view can also be filtered by the time and user(s)
• Click on “Users” to see who is using a website and for how long. If users are only using a website for a few hours each week, it may be worth looking to see if that website is still a good tool for the users, or if licenses could be re-allocated to someone else.

ActivConnect:

Outside of using the core ActivTrak platform, we also have the ability to leverage the ActivConnect add on to create combined reports and look at both website and application usage at the same time. With this feature there is the ability to dig even deeper into data and see things such as the percentage of users who used a particular website or application, what their weekly usage looks like compared to their team, and how their usage is trending:

Finally, using ActivConnect we can also get even more granular with the filters in place. Things such as type of day, which days of the week, setting limits on when to start reporting, and even excluding apps that may be common or not relevant to the type of research you are doing can all be done with the advanced filters afforded by using software such as PowerBI, Tableau, or even Google Data Studio.