Skip to main content

Using Insightful with virtual machines and remote servers

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

Written by Petar Jelaca

When you have Terminal server or virtual machines 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 Virtual machine/Server only

  • Install Insightful on both local device and Virtual machine/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 a virtual machine or 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 Virtual machine / Server only.

  • For use cases where tracking the time, productivity and other usage stats of employees that are working on virtual machines / servers and local device both, as they have some work to do remoting on a virtual machine / server but also work from local computers. In this case having Insightful installed on both Virtual machine / 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 Virtual machine / 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 Virtual machine / 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 virtual machine / remote server work only.
​
​With Insightful installed on virtual machine / 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 the local device only, a remote desktop (RDS/RDP) session is logged under the app used to connect (e.g. Remote Desktop Connection). It counts toward Work Time and Active Time (regular idle rules apply), but apps and websites used inside the session are not logged.

  • In Settings → Productivity Labeling, label that app according to how it is used (e.g. Productive). To see the activity on the remote desktop, install Insightful on the virtual machine / server as well.

Did this answer your question?