How can I determine server utilization which pre-dates what's recorded in the Columbus Job Status page?

How can I determine server utilization which pre-dates what's recorded in the Columbus Job Status page?

If you are interested in seeing who has been using the Columbus server but you want to look a little further back than the last date recorded in the Columbus job status page (which you can access via the Columbus web UI) then there are alternative options.

1 - Depending on the version of Columbus/Acapella being used Columbus stores the job status log either in the /var/lib/acapella/.imacro or the /var/lib/acapella/.Acapella/X.X directory (where X.X is the version of Acapella on your server), it's called ''jobstatus8282.log'' (see the Columbus ''Help'' menu for more information). By default The Jobstatus8282.log stores the last 31 days of jobs, anything over 31 days old is removed from the file.

You could use the jobstatus8282.log file to look back at previous usage.

2 - Alternatively you can view the user login attempts in the /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log file e.g.

$ grep Logged /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log

Would give you the date and time when a user logs in/out of Columbus.

You may also choose to output that to a file e.g.

$ grep Logged /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log > /home/columbus/UserLoginInfo.log

You can even go further. To get the number of unique users who have connected to columbus in a month you can query the /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log file. e.g.

$ awk '/2020-08-*/' /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log | grep -o "Logged in user: .*" | sort -u | wc -l

In this case we...

- search /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log for entries in a specific month (in this case August 2020)

awk '/2020-08-*/' /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log

- filter the output of above for the pattern "Logged in user: .*" which will return each a line for every single log in event - all user logins are considered

grep -o "Logged in user: .*"

- sort and filter the output for unique lines

| sort -u | wc -l

The output would be a number representing the number of unique users who have connected in the specified month.

If you wanted to see which users are included in the search filter just remove the trailing " | wc -l", to leave:

$ awk '/2020-08-*/' /var/log/columbus/web/columbus.log | grep -o "Logged in user: .*" | sort -u