Get Open & Sync Data for Every Project with Dynamo

Each Central Revit File has a backups folder. Within this backups folder is a worksharing log file (SLOG file), detailing who is working in a local copy of that model, when they opened it, when they synced, etc. As each item is timestamped, Dynamo can report this, and also calculate how long certain tasks took to complete.

By feeding the Dynamo script a list of file paths (for the SLOG files), data can be extracted for multiple projects simultaneously.

By exporting the data from Dynamo to Excel, this can be read by PowerBI (or Google Data Studio).

(None of the data below is real company data of course, it's been made up for the purposes of this post. I also took the opportunity to name my users after superheroes.)

The specifics:

You can see:

• who opened which file
• what time they opened it
• how long it took to open
• what times they synchronized throughout the day
• how long it took to sync

The value

All of this can help pinpoint causes of speed issues by evaluating office location, number of users accessing a model, users which may require hardware upgrades, etc. It also means that the total cost of all this time spent waiting can be calculated (time x rate) which could potentially be used to weigh up the cost of hardware upgrades or demonstrate the impact on project spend.

The Script:

The scripts makes use of the 'Journalysis' dynamo package (special thanks to Andreas Dieckmann).

The package contains nodes which make reading the SLOG files more logical, filtering by the type of log entry (or 'event') such as CreateLocalCopy and SyncWithCentral.