User activity
User activity in SaaS connects a user to an application and is a prerequisite for calculation of usage metrics.
Description
User activity connects a user to an application. It is a prerequisite for calculation of usage metrics and subscription optimization. It is also key to discovery of unknown SaaS and to application management.
User activity means when the user last had any activity in the application. The time for the latest activity, regardless of source, is presented in the Last active and Status columns in the SaaS tables. For some applications, activity cannot be monitored. If that is the case, this is also shown with a status. See SaaS tables — Reference for more details on activity statuses.
Activity sources
Activity data can come from multiple sources. User activity in SaaS applications is collected by SaaS connectors and the Browser extension for SaaS or Agent-based browser extensions.
Some enterprise subscriptions, such as those for Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, include applications installed on devices. See Activity for Microsoft applications on devices and Activity for Adobe Creative Cloud for more details.
To optimize subscriptions that include hybrid applications, user activity in applications installed on devices must be collected to get accurate usage metrics. See Device application usage for more information on this source.
Runs
Agent-based browser extensions collect the number of times a user has accessed a SaaS application in their browser, as well as a time stamp. This is shown in the Runs column in user tables as the total number of times that the user has accessed the application.