How to Track External App Usage?

[molshausen]

My boss and I are looking for ways to audit the list of apps that have been integrated at the account level. Ideally, we'd be able to check how often they are used as links or external tools for assignments at the course level. Is there a data-driven approach to doing this?

My coding skills are minimal, but I have time to learn the necessary tools if this can't really be done in something like Excel.

[stimme · Accepted solution]

With Canvas Data, you could create a report for external tool assignments & external tool module links. You can download the files from the Canvas Data Portal link in the account admin tab. The files you need are assignment_dim, course_dim, external_tool_activation_dim, and module_item_dim (account_dim and enrollment_term_dim are often also helpful to aggregate by sub-account or term). Once you get these files and expand them, you could import them as sheets in Excel.

For assignment_dim, you can use the values in the external_tool_id column for VLOOKUP on the external_tool_activation_dim table finding in the id column and returning from the name column.

For module_item_dim, you can use the same approach by filtering down to the ContextExternalTool type of items and looking up the url values.

I hope this makes sense. Your note about coding skills made me think giving SQL queries would be less helpful than recommending Excel techniques. Good luck!

[molshausen]

Thank you, stimme, this does sound like a solution I can wrap my mind around with some concentration. While I know some SQL terminology, it's been a long time since I've put it to any kind of use.

[Jeff_F]

Isn't @stimme awesome!?

And sometimes the LTI is accessed via the course menu vs. a module item. One CD report I've used lists out courses that have an LTI (external tool) available to students in the course navigation.  This uses the various course_ui navigation tables. Use this report to list courses and the tool names that are available to students on the menu.  Then with that course list as a filter we can then reference the Requests table to get an idea of how often the tool link is clicked.

[molshausen]

Yes - the biggest challenge we've faced is the fact that LTI usage takes on multiple forms, and thus is difficult to measure or compare across the board.

[fagers]

Can you do this using CD2? I'm not seeing a table/field for navigation links...LTIs in particular. Any help would be appreciated! I use SQL queries. Thanks in advance.

[pvemula]

Hi, I am an LTI tool developer and I have a tool that is built on LTI 1.3 Core-Advantage services. I am able to do a successful launch from Canvas to the tool but when initiating the LTI Deep linking from Canvas and when my tool sends back the LTI DeepLink response message to Canvas I am getting a 'Page Error'. In the browser dev tools I am seeing Http 422 error code. 

I am not getting this error with my local canvas dev instance but I getting this error when I am trying to integrate it with a client's Canvas instance (this is not a dev instance).

How to I go ahead with this issue, I was thinking of asking the client to look for the logs that are getting generated on Canvas and I am assuming these logs would be somewhere in the Canvas Data store, if my assumption is correct which dataset would be holding these details. Could anyone please point me in the correct direction.

PS- I have this integration working perfectly fine with Blackboard LMS so I am assuming that my implementation is not wrong I probably must have missed some step while doing the implementation for Canvas.