This video demonstrates how to use the SysTrack Persona Visualizer to understand user behavior, software usage, critical applications, resource consumption, and multi-system access for software licensing, support, and user analysis scenarios.
Video Transcript
Right now what I want to talk about is using the Lakeside SysTrack Persona Visualizer to better understand users.
This could be for a number of different reasons. Some of the ones that I can think of over the years include license remediation or justification for a particular piece of software. It depends on the environment and the group of users you're trying to understand. I've been around the block a few times, and sometimes we have software that might be really expensive and for which we don't have a lot of licenses. Sometimes we have to shift those licenses around and do whatever we need to do, or find out if somebody is actually using that software or not. As we all know, we can ask somebody if they're using a piece of software, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to give us the actual answer. They may not want to lose the software, even if they use it very seldom.
Another use case would be understanding what kind of resource consumption the user has. It's also useful if you need to be aware that a user has access to more than one system. That's what's really nice about the Persona Visualizer. You can see I have users pulled up and I'm looking at User Critical Applications. I can go ahead and search for a particular user, but in this demonstration what I want to do is focus on the number of applications. You can see that there are quite a few applications being run. This is the total across any system that this user is connecting to. You can see all the information about these applications, including performance and other related metrics. These are the applications they're running and what those averages are. It's very clear what they're doing overall, but what are the most critical applications, the ones they're focused on? We're capturing that focus time, and we can see that these are the most critical applications that they actually run.
Now we're understanding the applications. We're understanding that this user has quite a few, but the main ones they're using are these five. The user is consuming a lot of resources, so they're more of a power user. Now, if we want to look up this same person, we can go into User Systems. You'll notice here that if we search, we can find out that they're on three different systems. That in itself is really nice because, as an IT professional or Help Desk analyst, you're trying to figure out what's going on with the user. Or if you're trying to determine whether they actually use a piece of software that they're requesting or are justified in having, you may discover that they go down the hall and log on to another system that has that software installed. This lets you know how many systems they're actually connected to, which is really nice because now it's giving a full picture. We're tracking a user, a persona, here in the Persona Visualizer.
Then again, the same thing applies with resource consumption. Where are they sitting compared to all your other users?
Very quickly, you can come in here and start understanding your users, which is really nice. We're able to understand how many systems they're connected to. Are they connected to a virtual desktop, a desktop, a laptop, and so on?