Speed camera for Citirx

It’s part of the human condition that we take risks. Evident in how difficult we find it to stay at the speed limit. The introduction of speed cameras however, changed behavior, just knowing that we are been monitored reduce speed.

Monitoring in the workplace has existed for years in various forms. Typically used to record employees entering or exiting a building or room, exchanging emails, instant messages or conducting telephone conversions.

Recording a user's Citrix session is akin to introducing a speed camera into your applications. Just the knowledge that a users’ actions are been recorded, makes users behave within acceptable limits, and think twice about any actions they might take.

I've looked at two products that while both record Citrix sessions, are very different, SmartAuditor and ObserveIT.

Citrix with the release of XenApp 4.5 introduced SmartAuditor (SA), which requires platinum licensing. SA records the users’ session in full colour, and also lets you watch the recording a second or so behind real time. ObserveIT, on the other hand, captures a small grayscale picture of the screen after user input has occurred, so each product produces a very different visual record.While Citrix captures the whole session including display changes that might happen without user input and so provides a full recording, ObserverIT stores only changes on the screen generated by the user.

That's the main difference in the recording, but ObserveIT supplement the recording with Metadata about the users actions, for example if a user opened a command prompt this would be tagged, then if the user issues a ping command this again would be tagged, the result: you can quickly scroll down a list of user actions then click to see the related recording.

Both products can be configured to record a server desktop or published application on a per user basis, I’ve used this to only record third party access to applications while not recording internal trusted users.

Session recording is an emerging technology; it will be interesting to see how it matures and is used over the next few years.