In a recent webinar, our Customer Success team answered questions from LabStats customers. Explore more in-depth answers and additional resources below.
Has LabStats been used successfully on staff computers to find underutilized resources?
Yes, we have dozens of schools that have LabStats installed on all their machines–including staff and faculty machines.
Often, staff are issued a desktop and a laptop and one is used all the time while the other is not. We’ve had quite a few schools have really good success in issuing a single machine to each staff member, and let them choose what type of machine they receive. They don’t purchase both anymore and the school is able to save money.
We’ve also observed the following benefits of monitoring faculty computers:
Right-size spending on faculty technology resources
Provide “wish-list” software or hardware
Verify appropriate usage
Find out if faculty prefer a particular hardware setup over another, such as desktop vs. laptop PCs and possibly reduce hardware they don’t use
Adjust the refresh schedule according to usage to keep heavy users happy and save money on rarely used equipment
Provide a teacher-viewer login to run reports on specific classroom activity
Can group association be done in a batch rather than individually?
Yes, you can use the Station Manager to do it manually or set up the Active Directory integration to set up your group hierarchy.
To get started with the Active Directory integration, you’ll need the IP or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the Active Directory, and determine which organizational unit (OU) to use as the Group Root. The OU must contain all other OUs and computers that will be included in LabStats.
Navigate to Admin, click External Systems, then click Active Directory Settings. Enter the information gathered from Active Directory. See next steps.
Go to Application Manager and define your apps to start tracking them. In the LabStats portal, navigate to Applications then click Manager.
With LabStats, it is possible to track both Web and Desktop applications. These applications come either pre-populated, added via Software Inventory, or can be added manually.
How can non-persistent virtual desktops in VM Ware Horizon View that are not used by the same clients stay in their groups?
We recommend configuring the desktops to utilize a consistent range of MAC addresses or using a fixed set of host names to keep them in their same groups.
LabStats uses MAC Addresses as unique identifiers for stations. This allows LabStats to determine whether the data should go under an existing station or if a new one should be created. This works well in physical environments, but should be carefully managed in virtual environments.
Many virtual machines (VMs) have variable MAC Addresses, meaning the addresses can change every time the VM is spun up. In large virtual environments, this can create thousands of excess stations in LabStats. Excess MAC Addresses could lead to licensing problems and can also fragment usage data by spreading out login time (ie: an hour here or there among thousands of different station entries), rendering it almost useless.
Depending on your environment, we may recommend one of the following these workarounds.
When running a Login Summary report, why are stations that have no logins not showing up in the report?
Currently the Login Summary Report report only includes applications and machines that have one or more logins within the time period. To find zero-use data, follow the Finding Zero-Use tutorial.
LabStats tracks when you power on a computer, log in, and launch an application. That data is funneled into reports so you can see the most and least used computers.&n
