I am assigned to design a business system. The requirement of the client is that the software should start recording the user interactions from the user login to logout. It will be basically a class/object which will record the following items:
Amount of time user spent waiting to get a response for a request issued
The Paths user choose to reach a particular location inside the software.
Succcess/Failures/Retries
State of particular properties pertaining to the user (eg:- Username , Password,Login Time, SessionID, CountryName etc)
All these information will be used inside the software to make certain decisions, like LoginTime will be used by some function inside the software to calculate the timeout value for that session.
Additionally, These information will fed into some Business softwares which will help determining business decisions [eg:- Country/Location which is the highest contributor to the traffic, Most common paths users taking to reach a destination,etc]
Can you please advice a starting point for this project? Any examples in the market etc.
Is there any free/low cost business software which will accept data (recorded during working of the software) and create statistical information based on it?
I will be using C#/.net 3.5 for the development purpose.
I have used Omniture SiteCatalyst (which is now Adobe SiteCatalyst apparently) in the past and it is quite powerful.
It will allow you to track a huge number of things and is fairly easy to configure and examine the results. The information is stored offsite if I remember correctly and you get a browser based dashboard that allows you to dig through the data. You will have to read up on the details to look at the business intelligence capabilities.
There is also Google Analytics if you are looking for a free solution, but I'm not sure how the features compare.
If you are looking to roll your own, then your question is pretty open ended and probably cannot be answered here.
This answer only applies if you are writing web based software.