Monitoring Profiles
Monitoring profiles grant you the ability to control which type of information will be collected precisely. You may create as many monitoring profiles as needed and assign each of them to a specific group of users or departments. For example, you may enable screen monitoring for a group of employees and have them monitored from 8 AM to 5 PM; on the other hand, you can disable screen monitoring for another group of employees and have them monitored at all times.
In the virtual demo account, we have a few monitoring profiles that can help demonstrate the versatility across them, for example, “Diligent monitoring” (Screen recording, Snapshots, Keystrokes, and emails tracking are disabled), and “Full monitoring” (the tracking of all features will be enabled to conduct an investigation on users with a lower level of efficiency).
You can set up as many monitoring profiles as needed. To create a new profile, simply click the "Create” button at the top of the page.
To create a new monitoring profile, you need to click the “create” button which will redirect you to the monitoring profile set up page:
- General
- Schedule
- Screen
- Keystrokes
- Applications
- Web surfing
- Files
- Searches
- Sessions
- Emails
- Printing
- Idle sensitivity
- Web filter
General
This section includes:
- Profile name
- Users and departments the profile will apply to.
- Warning message text - This field is used to alert the user that his workstation is being monitored (The message will appear when the user signs in to his account).
- Allow the user to turn monitoring on and off: When enabled, it shows a taskbar icon with a start/stop monitoring menu for non-invasive monitoring.
Note: If the client (agent) is offline (not connected to the Controlio cloud server), the monitoring profile settings changes will be applied at its next connection.
Schedule
From this section, you can set up and control when users will be monitored. With the help of the Hours and Days selectors, you can specify exactly at which hours of the day, and on which days of the week user activity will be tracked.
Note: if the Icon mode is enabled, Schedule settings will take priority over users’ start/stop monitoring actions (The user cannot start monitoring on non-working hours or days).
Screen
In this section, you can enable/disable capturing snapshots, live stream of the screen, and continuous screen recording. Note that the screen will not be recorded during idle periods (when a user makes no action on the mouse or keyboard).
The Recording Method can be used for further customization of monitoring profiles, for example, you can choose to capture the screen on All apps and websites, or choose the option Listed only or All except listed. This list will enable or disable screen recording depending on which apps and websites are running on the foreground. For example, you may exempt banking websites and apps from being captured. The filtering list supports apps names or extensions, and domains names or masks:
- Notepad
- skype.exe
- bankofamerica.com
Controlio provides you with the ability to stream the screens of users in real-time, a video player enables watching what a user does as if you were standing behind him in an office setting. The live stream is available only when the user is online – from the Online Sessions report.
There are two video formats MPEG4 and PNG for screen records. It is recommended to use MPEG4, but in cases where there are issues with video encoding, you are recommended to use the PNG format.
Controlio has the ability to capture multiple monitors. You may select 1920 as the maximum screen width to capture a single monitor, 3840 to capture 2 monitors, or simply select AUTO to capture all connected monitors regardless of their number. The scaling of recorded screen videos may be adjusted to 50% or 25%, thus decreasing the resolution of the records as well as their size.
Keystrokes
The Keystrokes report shows the pool of all keystrokes pressed on monitored users’ keyboards. In addition to regular keystrokes, functional keystrokes (e.g. Ctrl, Shift, Alt) will also be recorded. All keystrokes are captured, regardless of the user's selected language.
The Recording Method can be used for further customization of monitoring profiles, for example, you can choose to capture the screen on All apps and websites, or choose the option Listed only or All except listed. This list will enable or disable keystrokes tracking depending on which apps and websites are running on the foreground. For example, you may exempt banking websites and apps from being captured. The filtering list supports apps names or extensions, and domains names or masks:
- Word
- discord.exe
- citigroup.com
Applications
The time users spend engaging in each application will be recorded and summarized in the activities report where you can view exactly how much time was spent on each windowed instance of a given application.
The Recording Method can be used for further customization of monitoring profiles, for example, you can choose to capture the screen on All apps, or choose the option Listed only or All except listed. This list will enable or disable time tracking depending on which application is running on the foreground. The filtering list supports applications names or extensions:
- Notepad
- slack.exe
Web surfing
The time users spend on each website accessed with the help of the most popular web browsers (Google Chrome, MS Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, SeaMonkey) will be recorded and summarized in the activities report where you can view exactly how much time was spent on each subdirectory of a given website.
The Recording Method can be used for further customization of monitoring profiles, for example, you can choose to track time on All websites, or choose the option Listed only or All except listed. This list will enable or disable time tracking depending on which website is being engaged on the foreground. The filtering list supports domains names and masks:
- *.facebook.com
- cnn.com
Files
In this section, you can enable/disable capturing file operations (create, copy, rename, delete, move) on local drives as well as on external ones such as USB drives.
Note that in order to exclude Windows/macOS system paths, the All except listed filter is applied by default:
Searches
Searches monitoring logs all keywords that are being looked up by employees on the most famous search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
Note: The Web surfing feature has to be enabled for this feature to work properly. Please view the Searches report here.
Sessions
Working sessions are tracked by the very first mouse/keyboard interaction a user makes on any given day, and up to the very last interaction made on that same day. Controlio also provides you with the ability to track employee work time by logon/logoff times. The number of sessions per day indicates the number of employees who were working on that day - View the Sessions graph here.
Emails
The email monitoring feature helps you understand how productive your team is when it comes to email usage. You will be able to see how much correspondence is sent by/to your employees. See the Emails report here.
The Emails report holds records of all emails being sent or received including information about the Senders, recipients, email subject, and body. A copy of any attachment can also be saved for you to download later.
This feature captures all the emails sent or received using the Microsoft Outlook application and webmails (Gmail, Yahoo mail, Outlook.com).
Please note the following:
- You can save attachments from the Microsoft Outlook application only.
- If you turn off webmail monitoring, the web filtering driver gets disabled on the user’s PC (This may fix incompatibility issues with 3rd party software).
- The Microsoft Outlook application’s email tracking does not use the web filtering driver.
Printing
The Printing tracking feature logs all print orders issued by employees via local or network printers. The report reflects the name of the printed document, the printer used, the computer from where the order was issued, the user who issued it, and the time at which the print order was initiated. Check the Printing report here.
Idle sensitivity
This parameter determines how active and idle time get tracked. If a user makes no keyboard or mouse interactions for 60 seconds, time starts counting as idle. This is the default Idle sensitivity value, and it can be adjusted to match the guidelines of your company’s work policy.
We understand that employees rarely tend to make any keyboard or mouse interactions during meetings, so we designed a custom idle sensitivity for meeting apps and websites to reflect idle time more accurately.
The meeting idle sensitivity applies to the applications and websites that are listed right below it. The most famous meeting applications and websites are already listed there by default.
Note: You may add any application or website to this list with the help of the ‘+’ button.
Web filter
The web filtering driver gets installed on a user’s PC when a website blocking rule is active or when Webmails monitoring is switched on for him.
From this section of the monitoring profile settings, you can control which traffic is intercepted by the web filtering driver, and on which web browsers or websites do the web filtering settings apply.
By default, traffic from the TCP port 443 is intercepted, and you may enable interception of local traffic (local proxies & antivirus).
With the help of the process filtering method, you can specify which web applications’ traffic will be intercepted by the web filter. If you keep the default settings, the most famous web applications’ traffic will be intercepted, but you are welcome to adjust that to match your needs.
Moreover, you may exclude the traffic interception of specific websites by listing them in the SSL exceptions list.