Keycyte PAM 3.2 · Administrator Guide

Monitoring Active Sessions

The Active Sessions page lists every session that is open through Keycyte PAM at this moment. From this page you can watch a session while it runs, send a message that appears in the user’s session, and close one or more sessions.

To open the page, select Sessions > Active Sessions.

Table View

By default the page shows the sessions in a table. The list refreshes automatically every 30 seconds; to refresh it at once, click Refresh in the toolbar. The Time column counts up every second.

You can sort the table by Portal User, Server, Account and Start Date.

Grid View

The grid view shows the live screen of every open session side by side, so that you can watch several sessions at the same time.

To switch to the grid view, click Grid View in the toolbar. The button is available only when at least one session is open.

The grid uses one column for a single session, two columns for two to four sessions, and three columns for five or more sessions. Each cell shows the user, the server and the elapsed time, and has View (opens the session in the large viewer) and Shutdown buttons.

To return to the table, click Table View.

Watching a Session

You can watch a running session in a viewer window. The viewer is read-only: your keyboard and mouse input is not sent to the session.

To watch a session:

1. In the row of the session, click View.
2. In the viewer window, use the maximize button to switch to full screen, if required.
3. To stop watching, close the viewer window.

How the session is shown depends on the protocol:

• RDP, VNC and web application sessions are shown as a live screen.
• SSH, Telnet and Kubernetes sessions are shown as a live terminal.

For RDP, VNC and web application sessions, the user receives a notification in the Client Panel when an administrator starts watching the session, and another when the administrator stops watching. The watch is also written to the Client log and appears in Session History as a session of the Admin Watch type.

Sending a Message to Users

You can send a short message that appears inside one or more open sessions, for example to warn users before maintenance.

Before you begin, make sure that your permission profile grants the Edit permission for Active Sessions. MASTER users always have this permission.

To send a message:

1. Do one of the following:
   • To send the message to one session, click Send message in the row of the session.
   • To send the message to several sessions, select the sessions in the table and click Send message in the toolbar.
2. In the Send message dialog, check the sessions listed under Recipients.
3. Under Severity, select Info, Warning or Error.
4. In Message, type the text. The message can be up to 500 characters long.
5. Click Send.

In RDP, VNC and web application sessions, the message appears as a banner in the user’s session window. In SSH, Telnet and Kubernetes sessions, the message is written into the user’s terminal. If the message cannot be delivered to some sessions, Keycyte PAM reports how many sessions received it and how many failed.

Terminating Sessions

Terminating a session closes the connection immediately.

Before you begin, make sure that your permission profile grants the Delete permission for Active Sessions. MASTER users always have this permission.

To terminate a session:

1. In the row of the session, click Shutdown.
2. In the confirmation dialog, confirm that you want to terminate the session.

To terminate several sessions at once:

1. Select the sessions in the table. The number of selected sessions appears next to the toolbar buttons.
2. Click Terminate selected.
3. Confirm the operation.

The terminated sessions disappear from the list. If some sessions cannot be terminated (for example, because they belong to servers you do not administer), Keycyte PAM reports how many sessions were terminated and how many failed. Every termination is written to the System log.