Are there any desktop application usage tracking systems that target VB6?

Question

We're trying to get some usage metrics on a VB6 application that we are targeting for migration into newer technologies. It is fairly massive (so big that its brushing up against the limits on numbers of forms etc. that VB6 has) and retrofitting some kind of custom monitoring in itself would not be a small task.

I was hoping that tools like DeskMetrics (I'm not singling them out) would have some kind of legacy COM control that we could drop into every form and with a bit of application level configuration and install of a local (on-site) set of web services we could capture some statistics that would allow us to make some decisions.

However:

1. There are no directly compatible VB6 libraries available for any of these tracking systems that I could find

2. Because our customer's sites aren't necessarily fully connected to the internet, we're having trouble finding any platform that can have an install locally at a customer site that is not connected to the wider internet.

So my questions is, are there any libraries/3rd-parties that do fulfil these requirements or are we best off rolling our own very simple tracking solution to a database and collecting that information by some kind of report.

Answer 1

Did you rule out google analytics already? If not this might be a solution

It's been a while for VB6 for me but pretty sure this will work

Create a user control and place a web browser control in side it. Then make the control auto navigate to your own website to a blank page which just has the analytics code on it. On the query string add in the form that is been displayed. This will give you basic form usage information.

If you need to track things further add a method to the control to log events and use ExecScript to call into the analytics api to pass the required information for that form.

Once the control is working should be a simple matter of dropping it onto each form. (You will want to get it to hide it self at runtime of course)

Of course this all relies on your clients having access to internet from their workstation