One of the new KPI’s introduced in the May 2017 update for Dynamics 365 Gamification is “user activity tracking.”

According to the documentation, this KPI ” award(s) points based on a user’s activity in Dynamics 365.” This “circular definition” is not extremely helpful, as it doesn’t define the types of user activity that give users points in a game.

Ahmend Hudda from Microsoft provides some additional clarification:

User Activity Tracking KPI refers to looking at audit log activity around CRM Sign In activity for the user.  It checks user sign in based on the time interval you setup in the KPI (e.g. 12 hours or 24 hours) and sends that data over to Gamification for active games using that particular KPI.  If you setup the KPI with say a 12 hour window, it will check whether a user has logged in at least once in the last 12 hours.

The goal here is to use Gamification to help companies with active Dynamics 365 licenses get the most out of their investment by encouraging steady user interaction with the product.

This means that if you count total logins for a user in audit logs, your number may be different that the number awarded in Gamification, but the approach that Microsoft has taken is a good balanced approach. it weeds out some of the noise in the audit logs, without reflecting inflated totals if users log in multiple times per day or connect to CRM for Outlook without really using the system. And by counting all logins within an interval as one user activity, it eliminates users gaming the system by logging in and out multiple times.

I’m glad to see that Microsoft has given us an easy to use way to see who is using the system.