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I work in IT support, almost exclusively on remote support. When I work on tickets I like to keep detailed, internal-only records. However, recently I'm getting sick of trying to strike a balance between the usefulness of the information and the effort required to document it so I was wondering if a piece of software exists that runs in the background recording computer usage to a text file that I can attach to the ticket instead of writing everything up?

Ideally, I'd like the log file to be something like the following:

2015/12/18 15:14.00: User opened chrome.exe, tab 3
2015/12/18 15:14.00: User browsed to https://login.microsoftonline.com/
2015/12/18 15:14.00: User entered [email protected] into the cred_userid_inputtext element
2015/12/18 15:15.00: User entered password into the cred_password_inputtext element
2015/12/18 15:15.00: User selected cred_sign_in_button element
2015/12/18 15:15.00: chrome.exe, tab 3 changed to https://portal.office.com/
2015/12/18 15:15.00: User closed chrome.exe, tab 3
2015/12/18 15:15.00: User opened "C:\Users\User\Documents\ping.log" in notepad++.exe

I realise this is a long shot but I just thought I'd ask as it would be great if I could have extremely detailed logs with little-to-no effort on my part.

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  • I know you want a recorder that outputs to text files but if you want a script that records screenshots, heres one
    – Tom
    Commented Dec 18, 2015 at 19:15
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    The tag "screen-recording" is not appropriate here since you don't want an audio+video capture Commented Dec 18, 2015 at 19:56
  • Removed "screen-recording" tag and added the "Windows" tag because the file path for the documents folder appear to be so, please change if needed.
    – Tom
    Commented Dec 18, 2015 at 20:00
  • With all my software programming background, I'd say something like this cannot be done in that detail as you like it. It can either be done with less detail (e.g. switching the program (application XY has received the focus)) or in much more detail (e.g. SysInternals Process Monitor, Wireshark). Especially I doubt that you would be able to distinguish what the user did and what a program did itself. Commented Dec 18, 2015 at 20:00
  • Maybe in C for windows you could use the PeekMessage API to write a program. It would be extremely complicated as messages are extremely simple and would have to be back tracked. There is a WM_CLICK event, but now you back track it to the textbox(etc), and back track that to the window. You could get the window name and EXE from there. Then use the parent child relationships of windows and other info to figure out if it was a tab, and then get the web page location from there. Also WM_KEYPRESS, and WM_CREATE.
    – cybernard
    Commented Dec 30, 2015 at 19:03

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