One of the analytics that I had to have on my program was How much time do users spend on my program? It is basically a measure of how useful the users find my program that they actively keep on using it. and used to promote users to actively start using the application.
I initially thought of using Time Span between when they start the application to when they close it but the problem was that users could just keep the application open and not use it.
I currently use TotalProcessorTime (C#/VB .Net) to let management know how much time users actively spend on the application. TotalProcessorTime give the amount an application uses the CPU but this does not translate well to management because even when a user actively uses the application for a few minutes the TotalProcessorTime would be far less.
Any out of the box thinking / suggestions?
Since you want to know how much people use your software as opposed to how long your software uses the CPU (they aren’t always the same thing), the way I’d do it (and I actually used this before) is to use GetLastInputInfo.
You can have a timer in your application and check every say.. 500ms if your application is the active application and GetLastInputInfo returns the system has been idle for less than some threshold (5-10sec depending on what your application does). As long as both of these two conditions hold, you can add 500ms to your application active usage.
Of course, you can still track total CPU usage as a separate statistic, but I think my way provides a more… focused usage counter for your application.