Monitoring logon sessions in a large Windows network

[vanHunks]

My employer runs a large single-domain Windows-based network, with several thousand users around the country. I asked the experts six months ago to monitor and report regularly the login sessions of a subset of the users. I still have no result from them. Something I would have thought is a simple configuration is being treated as a major development exercise. We run an AD management tool which I assumed would make the whole thing even simpler.

For anyone who's sucessfully done this already, is this really such a big deal or are my "experts" simply sitting on their hands ? My own experience in this area is limited to the previous networking architecture (SNA) in which this would have been an utterly trivial exercise - have we really taken such a huge step backwards ? Common enough in the world of IT, I suppose !

 

[SauRoNZA]

Are you trying to monitor the login / logout time to determine how long someone was working? In sort of a timesheet fashion.

Getting the base line information out of AD can't be too hard, but collating the data into a consumable format might be the real challenge.

I haven't used AD in a long time, just wondering exactly what you are trying to achieve here.

 

[vanHunks]

That sounds pretty close - simple, isn't it ? I just want a record of sessions - who logged on where and when and for how long. Having these data will allow us to measure overall utilizations and to monitor both individual and groups of workstations and users.

 

[KobusDJ]

I implemented this scripts this morning to see how it goes.

login.bat
echo %username%, %computername%, %date%, %time%, on >> \\SERVER\Share\%username%.csv

logoff.bat
echo %username%, %computername%, %date%, %time%, off >> \\SERVER\Share\%username%.csv

I added it to the Logon and Logoff in group policy.

It works well... but obviously does not record the "Logoff" in case the power on the workstation goes out.