Skip to main content
Using Insightful with remote servers

This article explains most common practices of deploying and using Insightful with RDS / RDP, and any other remote session or virtualization

Uros Maksimovic avatar
Written by Uros Maksimovic
Updated over 9 months ago

When you have Terminal server or any other kind of RDS utilization that your employees are working with, you have several options regarding how and where to deploy / install Insightful, depending on the different use cases:

  • Install Insightful on Server only

  • Install Insightful on both local device and Server

  • Install Insightful only on local device


Use cases

  • If you wish to log the time along with productivity and other usage stats of employees that are connecting to a kind of terminal server system as they use local devices just to connect / create a session through RDP to one Windows server and all work is done on the server. This use case requires deploying Insightful on the Server only.

  • For use cases where tracking the time, productivity and other usage stats of employees that are working on servers and local device both, as they have some work to do remoting on a server but also work from local computers. In this case having Insightful installed on both Server and local device is recommended.

  • When tracking the time, productivity and other usage stats while employees are working from local computers only with occasionally having a session to a Server, Insightful can be installed just on local machine. Time spent on remote session will be logged as app used for creating a session only, all other usage stats for time spent on session will not be logged.

Expected results

With Insightful installed just on Server, data from each remote session will be logged to a corresponding user who started that session and will include data collected while the session is active and from remote server work only.

With Insightful installed on server and local device, full data will be collected from both the session (or sessions) while employee is working on a remote desktop and local computer usage while they are doing work that is not on remote desktop servers.


If Insightful is installed on local device only, and employee is using remote desktop services to establish sessions and work on a remote desktop, time spent on a session will be logged as active while data from the local device usage will only be logged.

While it will account remote session for total Work time - time spent working for the day and also for active time spent on a device, it will not account other stats, apps and websites used on remote server. Instead, all usage it will be accounted only as app used to connect from local device.



Did this answer your question?