Sketchup Pro Usage tracking

SketchUp Pro
1

We are trying to manage our sketchup pro user subscription licenses and there is absolutely no information about actual usage for the staff that are assigned Sketchup Pro licenses. Most products that have transitioned to “more expensive” subscription services at least start providing some bare minimum of tracking capabilities to see when a user last used the license or even a more in depth reporting capability for daily usage. We really want to know who are the users that are active with the software and wether they actually need the license assigned of if they could be better allocated. Does anyone else have any suggestions for tracking daily usage? Any 3rd party tools that you are using that work for this? Any hint that Trimble will add this basic functionality for all of the extra cost that the subscriptions add?

2

Please fill out your profile correctly. It contradicts with your post.

3

I checked with colleagues, and Trimble doesn’t have such tracking software. One person suggested that there are third party tools for tracking any application’s usage, but didn’t have a specific named tool to recommend.

4

Don’t know if this will do what you want. Worth taking a look.

5

thanks, updated

6

Yeah, this is interesting but not sure this would do what we are looking for. This seems to be more for data on the actual machine usage detail versus what we are looking for is did user1 use sketcup on x day. As an example, here is another subscription based cloud tool we use, and in the manage user page, we can see the “user last active date/time” for each user.
image
Of course in autodesk account management, we can see which users used what products on which days

Is there a location for posting enhancement requests for Sketchup Pro?

7

Yes, start a new topic under the Feature Request category.

8

We had the same issue. We ended up creating our own plugin that writes username and timestamp to a central file. Reading that file in PowerBI gives us that data we need. I paste the code below

require 'sketchup.rb'
require 'extensions.rb'
require 'date'

module suPlugin
  module SketchupLogging

    current_time = DateTime.now
    formatted_time = current_time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S")
    current_user = ENV['USERNAME']
    sketchup_version = Sketchup.version

    File.write('//<servername>/<share_name>/Log/sketchuplog.txt',current_user + ";" + formatted_time + ";" + sketchup_version + "\n", mode: 'a')

  end # module SketchupLogging
end # module suPlugin

Save the file as logger.rb for example and place it in the plugin folder of SketchUp. C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2023\SketchUp\Plugins in my case on windows.

Once sketchUp starts it writes a line to the file.
It gives us an indication how licenses are used.

This functionality was present in older versions, but has been taken out. No idea why this isn’t present anymore. Some insight in the usage of licenses would be very much appreciated.

I hope this helps anyone.

1 Like
9

Hi, This is exactly what I was after. But i’m struggling with getting it to work.

Are ‘module suPlugin’ & ‘module SketchupLogging’ custom modules? I can’t find any reference to them online.

Thanks

10

It’s just how I named the modules.

Have you tried to create a new file in the plugin folder with a .rb extension. Open it in you favorite text editor en past my code. Update the text file location and save the file.

It should now load into Sketchup. You can check it in the extension manager.

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In our case I named it egm_logger. It’s the name of the file.

11

Thanks for the speedy reply.

I have copied and pasted you code directly into a txt file and changed it to a .rb extension and it shows up in the extension manager.

Logger
Logger1552×129 7.56 KB

And i’ve saved a logfile.txt to a folder called SKP on the c drive.

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image1495×535 11.7 KB

But that txt file doesn’t populate when skp is loaded.

Am i missing something really obvious?

Thanks again

12

Sorry, my mistake.

The module suPlugin needs to start with a capital, so SuPlugin.

require ‘sketchup.rb’
require ‘extensions.rb’
require ‘date’

module SuPlugin
module SketchupLogging

current_time = DateTime.now
formatted_time = current_time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S")
current_user = ENV['USERNAME']
sketchup_version = Sketchup.version

File.write('c:/skp/logfile.txt',current_user + ";" + formatted_time + ";" + sketchup_version + "\n", mode: 'a')

end # module SketchupLogging
end # module SuPlugin

1 Like
13

Thanks so much, It’s working now.

I appreciate your help!