How can I track sessions (session duration, where user logs in from, etc) using Google's default authentication on Appengine?

Question

I would like to keep track of my users - who logs in, how long they are logged in for, where they log in from, etc. - from my GAE app. I'm wondering what is a good way to do this using the authentication mechanisms provided by Google.

I can easily add decorators and constraints in app.yaml to ensure that specific endpoints are only accessible if the user has logged in; however, this does not really give me the information I require.

Obviously, Google does session management under the hood - is it possible to talk to this in any way? If not, are there other tried and tested approaches which I can leverage to track the above information?

It's not clear to me what sort of functionality you're looking for - it seems to me that all the information you need is already available to you. There are no hooks to integrate into the users API other than what's publicly documented, though. — Nick Johnson, Oct 17 '11 at 03:18
@NickJohnson - I want to have aggregate statistics on how many users log in to my site (per day, per week, etc), when they log in, how long they are logged in for, where they log in from, etc. This seems to be very much session related info and hence I was asking abt access to session info. What solutions are you referring to when you say that all the info is already available? — Sean M, Oct 17 '11 at 09:12
I mean that you can already tell when a user logs in, how long they stay logged in for, and so forth, by examining requests made by that user. Google doesn't really have any info you don't in that respect. — Nick Johnson, Oct 17 '11 at 10:41
@NickJohnson - thanks for speedy reply. I had assumed that Google tracked the sessions and was wondering if it was possible to tap into this instead of replicating some of the functionality in the application. — Sean M, Oct 17 '11 at 14:34

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 14 '11 at 22:08

When a user logs in, flag that user as active within the datastore, use memcache to store whatever session info you want, then run a regular job that checks the active users and saves the data from inactive sessions (ie older than 20 mins or so) to the datastore.

Here's an example that tracks a user's start and end time:

def setUserSession(user):
    date = datetime.datetime.today()
    user_session = memcache.get("UserSession%s" % user.user_id())
    if user_session is not None:
        user_session = user_session.split(",")
        memcache.replace("UserSession%s" % user.user_id(),"%s,%s" %(user_session[0],date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")))
    else:
        memcache.set("UserSession%s" % user.user_id(),"%s,%s" %(date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")))
        profile = db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM UserProfile WHERE User = :1", user).get()
        if profile:
            profile.LastSession = date
            profile.IsActive = True
            profile.put()
        else:
            profile = UserProfile()
            profile.User = user
            profile.FirstSession = date
            profile.LastSession = date
            profile.IsActive = True
            profile.put()

def collectUserSessions():
    active_users = db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM UserProfile WHERE IsActive = :1", True)
    for u in active_users:
        session = memcache.get("UserSession%s" % u.User)
            if session:
                session = session.split(',')
                last_active = parseDate(session[1]) #parses string into datetime object
                if date - datetime.timedelta(minutes=20) > last_active:
                    record = SessionHistory()
                    record.User = u.User
                    record.SessionStart = parseDate(session[0])         
                    record.SessionEnd = last_active
                    record.put()
                    memcache.delete("UserSession%s" % u.User)                       
                    u.LastSession = last_active
                    u.IsActive = False
                    u.put()
            else:
                u.IsActive = False
                u.put()

Thanks for your thoughts. It looks quite reasonable; however, ideally, I was hoping to piggyback on some of Google's functionality. I'll leave it open for another while to see if anyone has thoughts on whether this is possible. — Sean M, Oct 15 '11 at 15:43

How can I track sessions (session duration, where user logs in from, etc) using Google's default authentication on Appengine?

1 Answers1