Managing User Licenses

[nasimg]

Is there a way to find out if an analyst is using their license - we have setup a number of customers as users because they manage applications in the business. When I check their details I can see if they have ever logged in, but I assume if they log a ticket via the Service Portal this counts as a log in.

What I really need is a way of checking if a user has logged into the Live portal.

Regards

Nasim

[TrevorKillick]

Hi Nasim

Portal users do not use up any of your Licences but if you need to check if they have logged in or not you can take a look in the table h_sys_security_log this was recently added as part of a future feature for auditing logins to the Hornbill system.

Kind Regards

Trevor Killick 

[Alex8000]

Hi @TrevorKillick,

How does one distinguish between (basic) users and external customers in this log? I was thinking that was what the h_source column would be used for, but this does not seem to be the case.

Thanks,

Alex

[TrevorKillick]

Hi @Alex8000

Looking at the source code h_source distinguishes between Contacts and Users logging in directly or using SAML but nothing to show is a User was a Basic user, i will have a chat with @Gerry and see if there are any plans to add this distinction into the audit log.

Kind Regards

Trevor Killick

[Alex8000]

Hi @TrevorKillick,

Thanks! Just to be clear, I am mostly interested in distinguishing users from guests visiting through the customer portal.

Specifically, we are looking for a way to measure the amount of customers actually using the customer portal and the amount of times they have logged in over the past x days. 

Thanks, 

Alex

[nasimg]

Also can we change the way an account defaults to "user" when they created manually, we automate majority of our accounts but we do occasionally manually create them. The default is set to "user" when I think it should be "basic" - this would stop accidently user licenses being taken.

[Gerry]

Nasim,

In most cases, customers don't create basic users, the admin is generally used to create normal users. Basic users were an "add on" to support the unified mapping between a portal user and a normal collaboration user which is why the input defaults to user. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

@Alex8000 you can differentiate between guest and user logins with the h_source value defined as follow: -

    enum securityEventSource
    {
        GuestLocal = 0,
        GuestSaml = 1,
        UserLocal = 2,
        UserSaml = 3,
        System = 4
    };

Gerry

[Alex8000]

Hi @Gerry,

I must be reading this wrong, but when I take a look at the h_sys_security_log table I see internal analysts, admin account and my customer portal test user accessing the portal all as h_source = 2.

What am I missing here?

(also, did one of you log in on our instance at 11:00:39 08-08-2016? I see an internal IP address in the log ;-))

Thanks!

Alex

[nasimg]

Thanks @Gerry useful background to why you default to User, but we need an easy way of working out if our analysts are actually using their licenses. We are trying to encourage greater usage of the live portal to staff who are not standard IT analysts, but do an IT function. If we can't easily check usage we will have to restrict access - which is something I don't want to do. We can run reports on call ownership but I was thinking of some type of user management reporting - even expanding on the last login time giving both Service and Live portals. Currently I see last login time but I'm assuming this covers logins to either portal.

[Gerry]

@Alex8000,

Sorry for the delayed reply, I had to look into it.  The problem would appear to be you are using "Basic" users and this security logging was not differentiating between Users and Basic Users.  This has been addressed now so the h_source column will contain one of the following values, this should give you what you need. 
 

    enum securityEventSource
    {
        GuestLocal = 0,
        GuestSaml = 1,
        UserLocal = 2,
        UserSaml = 3,
        System = 4,
        BasicLocal = 5,
        BasicSaml = 6
    };

This will be in the next core service update which is currently taking about 5 days. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

Hi @nasimg,

Yes that was the case, however, please see my previous comment, the source will now differentiate between normal and basic users logging into the service portal. 

You can of course use the reporting feature in admin to report on this data. 

Hope that helps. 
Gerry