Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added).

Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double quote I use as my delimiter in the awk is from us adding the user-agent to the webserver logs.If you have not set up your logs to use this, then you’ll either need to do so or figure out which position is appropriate for you with a space delimiter. The colon in the second awk is where just after the username the log records the reads and writes to the database.

| awk -F\” ‘{print $3}’ | awk -F\: ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq

An example usage is a case was escalated to me where a student had trouble taking an assessment. That student was, of course, using Internet Explorer 7, a web browser which prior CE/Vista 8.0.4 was supported. Now it is not. (Could be likely this is reason Blackboard stopped supporting in.) So I was curious how many users are still trying to use this browser.