Users Online - how do you use it?

[elbranscomb]

Looking to see how everyone is using the Users Online page. A fellow Atlas member shared this url so you can quickly see some detail on who is currently online:

https://community.[yourcommunity].com/t5/forums/usersonlinepage/ 

Reasons I go to this page are:

1. Validate our Vitality stat on our Home page if it's significantly higher or lower than normal
2. Look for a specific user who I might be tracking for potential spam and see where they are in the community and check idle time
3. Investigate if we have a high number of anonymous users coming from a similar IP range
4. Look for patterns of behavior that might suggest a specific area of the site getting a lot of interest that we weren't aware of

However the page is somewhat limited in its OOB and wondered what others have done to improve this. Here's the screenshot of what I see available to me. 

Here's what I can do - sort by username, IP address and then scroll through 537 pages of records. 

I'd like to be able to:

1. Search all users online by username or IP address

2. Sort by area of the site users are on - node, board or post

3. Have some kind of chart showing most popular locations by users online

Feels like this page could be much more valuable for real-time tracking so wondering if anyone has found a way to do anything else with it. 

[Cloud_Spanner]

Thanks for sharing this feature. 

Regarding #3, we have the Care module hooked up into our Community so we have an indication of where the traffic is going at the global and board level. From the roadmap presentation it sounds as if this is the direction Community Analytics is going. 

Care Analytics Snapshot

[Claudius]

My only use case for looking at the online users page is to find a brand new registered user that is not returned yet via the community's user search (as that some time has a longer delay to index new users).

Other than that I cannot see any good use for it as I wouldn't see what process I could build of real time monitoring which pages users are on. All page view metrics are available in Community Analytics so I can identify popular areas and content there and the real time aspect would only skew my attention to potential outliers.