in reply to How to do session times The Right Way

The problem which the higher ups generally need solved is, "How many people are/were on at <time>?" where <time> may be "now", "5:04:02 yesterday", or "between 2:00 and 10:00 two thursdays ago".

On trick for approaching this problem is to consider who is asking the question, and how much accuracy they really need. (They might say they want to be able to ask for the number of sessions at an arbitrary time, but will the go away happy if you give them a session count to the nearest five-minute interval?)

And if your "higher ups" are anything like what mine have been, they communicate using PowerPoint. Consider answering their questions in a similar way -- with a one page graphic.

Instead of building a fancy query facility, scan the logs once, and emit enough data to feed into your favorite graphing tool (I've used Excel) to produce a graph they can look at. Dropping out a datapoint every 5 minutes gives you more than enough data to build a nice line chart. You can even automate the process via Win32::OLE.

My bosses have appreciated it when I've given them stuff they can copy/paste into a PowerPoint slide.

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Re: Re: How to do session times The Right Way
by strider corinth (Friar) on Nov 01, 2002 at 15:08 UTC
    Well, yeah. The thing is that they weren't asking the question I posed, really. =)

    I know what they're looking for, and for their purposes, one of the three methods I mentioned would serve. But none of them is the Best Way. I've had to deal with this problem for years, and my needs have changed over the course of time. I want something that will work for all of the situations I've been in.

    Think of it this way: you can write a script to do something once. I've done that (I think) twice for this kind of problem. What I want is a way to help everybody do this kind of calculation. So I'm thinking of the problem more in this sense: "how can I make this a module?" Somebody will need that high granularity at some point. It might be me.

    You're definitely right in terms of work (and also relationships, by the way ;). Slways try to figure out what's really being asked, rather than what's being said: it's always better to understand than just to listen.
    --

    Love justice; desire mercy.
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