get user last login details

Certified Senior Developer

Hello Everyone,

Is there any approach to retrieve a user's last login details without accessing log files? For example, is there a function or method we could use to capture login information when a user accesses a specific link or application?

Thanks & Regards,

Srikanth.

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    Certified Lead Developer

    It is possible to do this with some development and with a service account that is allowed to read the log files during a nightly job. It's also possible to stream Appian's logs to your company/client's services and setup a tool like Grafana (via Loki) to parse / graph results.

    Appian officially supports a log reader plugin that can be developed into a fully-functional app usage reporting tool. I've used it to understand what users use each site page and record type (via sites-usage and record-usage). On top of the static reports, if you combine a scraper process model with a generic record and a clever UI that allows configurability of a report, then you can answer almost any question you have about site, record, or API usage directly from within Appian. 

    It can also be used to tease out whether a specific user accessed a specific record (since there's parse-able metadata in the sites-usage and records-usage logs). I had to do that a couple of times for the security team.

    Beyond that, there's not really a way to determine if a specific user clicked on a specific link. The REST Details logs give aggregated information about various back-end links on the environment, but the URLs are pretty obscure and IMO take entirely too much experimentation to get to a modicum of reliable reporting on. 

    I also had a requirement to track the timing of "page loads", which in many contexts meant "track the amount of time it takes a process model to go between two nodes on the activity chain". That took a bit of brute force tracking as Shubham suggests, since there is no way to access a process model's node timing data from a process report (afaik).

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer

    It is possible to do this with some development and with a service account that is allowed to read the log files during a nightly job. It's also possible to stream Appian's logs to your company/client's services and setup a tool like Grafana (via Loki) to parse / graph results.

    Appian officially supports a log reader plugin that can be developed into a fully-functional app usage reporting tool. I've used it to understand what users use each site page and record type (via sites-usage and record-usage). On top of the static reports, if you combine a scraper process model with a generic record and a clever UI that allows configurability of a report, then you can answer almost any question you have about site, record, or API usage directly from within Appian. 

    It can also be used to tease out whether a specific user accessed a specific record (since there's parse-able metadata in the sites-usage and records-usage logs). I had to do that a couple of times for the security team.

    Beyond that, there's not really a way to determine if a specific user clicked on a specific link. The REST Details logs give aggregated information about various back-end links on the environment, but the URLs are pretty obscure and IMO take entirely too much experimentation to get to a modicum of reliable reporting on. 

    I also had a requirement to track the timing of "page loads", which in many contexts meant "track the amount of time it takes a process model to go between two nodes on the activity chain". That took a bit of brute force tracking as Shubham suggests, since there is no way to access a process model's node timing data from a process report (afaik).

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