User Activity

Complete the following fields:

Option Description
General

Monitor this data source and collect activity data

Enable monitoring of the selected data source and configure Netwrix Auditor to collect and store audit data.

Notify users about activity monitoring

You can enable the message that will be displayed when a user logs in and specify the message text.

Record video of user activity within sessions
  • If disabled, only user session events will be collected (regardless of whether the user is idle or not).
  • If enabled, the product will both collect user session events and record video of user activity.

By default, this option is disabled.
Video Recording

NOTE: For these settings to become effective, enable video recording on the General tab.

Adjust video quality

Optimize video file by adjusting the following:

  • File size and video quality
  • Save video in grayscale
  • CPU load and Video smoothness.

Adjust video duration

Limit video file length by adjusting the following:

  • Recording lasts for <...> minutes—Video recording will be stopped after the selected time period.

  • User has been idle for <...> minutes—Video recording will be stopped if a user is considered inactive during the selected time period.

    NOTE: If the Record video of user activity within sessions option is enabled, the User Sessions report shows active time calculated without including user idle period. Mind that a computer is considered to be idle by Windows if there has not been user interaction via the mouse or keyboard for a given time and if the hard drives and processors have been idle more than 90% of that time.

  • Free disk space is less than <...> MB—Video recording will be stopped when upon reaching selected disk space limit.

  • Consider user activity — Select one of the following:

    • Stop if user has been idle for <...> minutes. Select if you want video recording for a user to be stopped after the specified time period.
    • Continue video recording regardless of the user idle state. When selected, Netwrix Auditor continues video recording for idle users.

Set a retention period to clear stale videos

When the selected retention period is over, Netwrix Auditor deletes your video recordings.
Users

Specify users to track their activity

Select the users whose activity should be recorded. You can select All users or create a list of Specific users or user groups. Certain users can also be added to Exceptions list.
Applications

Specify applications you want to track

Select Windows applications that you want to monitor. Available options:

  • All applications — all applications running on the target computer will be monitored.
  • Specific applications — only the applications you specify in the inclusion list will be monitored.

In both cases, you can specify application to exclude from monitoring — for that, select the Exceptions option.

For more information, see How to include/exclude applications.
Monitored Computers

For a newly created monitoring plan for User Activity, the list of monitored computers is empty. Add items to your monitoring plan and wait until Netwrix Auditor retrieves all computers within these items. See Add Items for Monitoring for more information. The list contains computer name, its current status and last activity time.

Review your data source settings and click Add to go back to your plan. The newly created data source will appear in the Data source list. As a next step, click Add item to specify an object for monitoring. See Add Items for Monitoring for more information.

How to include/exclude applications

To create a list of application to include in / exclude from monitoring, you will need to provide:

  1. Title — application title as shown on top of the application window, for example, MonthlyReport.docx - Word.

    2. TIP: Title can also be found in the "What" column of related Netwrix Auditor reports and search results, for example, in the User Sessions report.

  2. Description — as shown in the Description column on the Details tab of Windows Task Manager.

TIP: Using Description can help to filter out several components of a single application — for example, all executables having TeamViewer 14 description belong to the same app (see the screenshot above).

To create a list of inclusions / exclusions for applications:

  1. Click Add on the right of the list.
  2. Enter application title and description you have identified.

Wildcards (*?) are supported and applied as follows:

  • * - Notepad (the "Title" filter) will exclude all Notepad windows.
  • colo?r * (the "Title" filter) will exclude all application window titles containing "color" or "colour".

NOTE: Same logic applies to the inclusion rules.

Example

To exclude the Notepad application window with "Document1" open, add the following filter values:

  • In the Title filter enter "Document1.txt - Notepad":

  • In the Description filter, enter the corresponding value, here it will be "Notepad".