Insights Features

Insights module helps you get more visibility into your users activity and resource utilization.

Craig Medland avatar
Written by Craig Medland
Updated over a week ago

Keeping track of your resources utilization is a key to optimize any RDS or virtual server environment. itopia released new Insights module that can help you understand:

  • User Activity: How many users are online per hour/ day and what session hosts are they connected to. This tool can be used to optimize your server uptime schedules.

  • Resource Utilization: See statistics for your RAM and CPU utilization throughout the day/week/month.

  • Application Utilization: Identify unused application licenses, this tool tells you which applications are most used and which users access them.

  • File Activity: Learn what files your users access most frequently.

  • GCP Billing Insights: monitor your GCP cost trends and identify the components that the most expensive. To setup GCP billing insights, click here.

Insights implementation to existing deployments

New insights features are available for all new deployments. The implementation for existing deployments will occur in phases, our team will gradually enable Insights for the existing deployments in alphabetical order. Feel free to contact the support team for more information or to request enabling Insights for your deployment.

How Insights work?

itopia CAS uses Windows services that are by default installed in all the Windows machines during the deployment process. Services are set to start automatically and are running in all booted VM's in regular intervals and saving data in customer's own GCP project using BigQuery. Itopia databases are not storing the data. The monitoring data is uploaded from your BigQuery to CAS portal once a day.

See below the list of services and the server they are installed on:

Since the services are set to start automatically with a 30 seconds timeout, in some cases the start can fail. This depends on the server specifics and the amount or type of services starting in the server. We recommend to monitor these services with your RMM or set them to delayed start.

How to enable / disable Insights?

Insights are enabled by default in all the new deployments and will be gradually enabled for the existing deployments. You can disable insights from the Deployment settings

Click the gear in the top right and look at the bottom section of the settings window to enable /disable the Insights features.

What is the cost?

Google has a free tier for some operations inside BigQyery, you can check the pricing details here.
In our experience, the average cost per 2 terminal server deployment turned on for 24/7 is approximately $0.71/ month.

Access Insights from the main menu on the left - Insights

User Activity

User Activity tab displays the number of your online users per hour throughout the day.
Just select the Deployment you want to see the data for and filter the activity day using Hourly view or filter custom day(s) using Daily view:

On the bottom you can see what server were the user connected to.

Note: Due to a BigQuery schema change released on 4/1/2019 you won't be able to make single queries combining the time periods before March 31st and after April 1st.

File Activity

Choose the deployment on top and you can review what files are accessed most frequently and by which users.

In "Users by File" section you can select a file and see users that access it. 

Or go to "Files by User" section and see the list of files your selected user is accessing:

Control the time range on the right from the File/ User drop down.

Application Activity

Application activity feature shows most used applications and users who access them.
You can see 2 filters. Application filter on the left that presents users that access the selected application and User filter on the right that shows applications each user accessed on the selected date.

Resource Utilization

You can access resource utilization insights from VM Instances module under Cloud Manager section.
Just click on the server you'd like to see the Compute utilization for:

Select the day from the calendar under Instance compute utilization and the RAM and CPU graph will be displayed below. Hovering the mouse over the graph you can see exact RAM and CPU amounts per minute:

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