last_login vs last_request

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brenden_goetz
Community Novice

We're exploring login data and I am curious what the difference is between last_login and last_request from the pseudonym_dim table. There are some big gaps in the dates sometimes (e.g. last_login = April 11, 2016 while last_request = May 7, 2016 for a given pseudonym). Does this indicate that a user logged in on April 11th and somehow managed to keep an active session going for several weeks, with the most recent activity on May 7th? Or am I way off base here? Any guidance on how to interpret login/user/pseudonym data would be great. Thanks!

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smccann
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Hello Everyone,

Was just notified of this post by another school. Hopefully I can shed some light into why you may be seeing a large difference between last_login and last_request.

The most immediate example that comes to mind is mobile sessions. When a user first logs into the mobile app, it creates a session that will persist forever until they uninstall the app, or explicitly log out. You can hopefully see now how this large gap can easily occur.

Another example of a long standing session may also be a user who has never closed the Canvas tab within their browser. We do not force people out of the system (banks do this by automatically redirecting you to login page), but rather wait for their next request to the system to verify the authentication. This also could result in a session seeming to span a day or more. Just as a note, the default Canvas Authentication session is set at 24 hours.

Please let me know if you have further questions about this.

Thank you!

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