NetResults ProblemTracker
User Sessions

Overview

A current snapshot of all user sessions can be found in the User Sessions section in the Admin page. Each user session begins when a user logs in and ends when they click the Logoff icon (or when you close their session, see below). A tally of user sessions by license type as well as total sessions allowed by each license key appears at the top of the page. Please note that the Admin user session is not not counted against the license limit.

To see a list of current User Sessions:

  1. Login to the workgroup as Admin.
  2. Click on the Admin icon.
  3. Click on the User Sessions button.
  4. By default the list of sessions will be sorted by User ID (ascending). To change the sort order, click on the UserId, Last Login Time, or License Type column label. Clicking a column label a second time will change sort order (ascending to descending or vice versa). When you click on the License Type column, it will use User ID as a secondary sort criterion (sort by User ID ascending for those users with the same License Type).
  5. To end a user session, click on the Logoff button, then click OK on the popup to confirm. More information about closing user sessions can be found below.

Closing User Sessions

A listing of each individual user session follows, which includes the User ID and last login time. The license type is listed for each user session. A Logoff button appears for each user session except Admin. You can terminate a user session by clicking the Logoff button. This is useful in cases where the limit of active floating user sessions has been reached causing another user to be unable to login. Also, this Logoff functionality can be used to clear out all user sessions when Administrative tasks need to be performed on the database (database backup, making large changes, etc.)

Note: A user may only terminate their session by clicking the Logoff icon. Simply exiting their browser will not terminate their session. If a user does exit their browser (or shuts down their machine) without clicking the Logoff icon, they can end their previous session by attempting to login again. At that point they will be offered an opportunity to terminate their previous session. By answering YES to terminating their previous session (and then clicking the Logoff icon at some point after successfully logging in this time), they can remove any "stale" sessions they have created without your assistance. Similarly, if a user browses off to another site without clicking the Logoff icon to end their ProblemTracker session, they can click the Back button on their browser several times to return to the last ProblemTracker page they were on and then click the Logoff icon. Or, they can simply browse back to the login page, login again (in this case no message about a previous session will be displayed as cookie information in their browser lets us know which session they were previously using), then click the Logoff icon on the Home page when it is displayed. ProblemTracker does not allow more than one active session per user account (irrespective of license type), so if a user logs in and then logs off they can always be certain that they have not left any active sessions around. The information above is explained to your users in the Logging In section of the User's Guide, though you may wish to provide an explanation that is more specific to your ProblemTracker configuration.

Session Timeout

A session timeout is configured by default in all ProblemTracker workgroups. This timeout will end a user's session after a certain length of inactivity time (time where the user has not performed any actions in ProblemTracker). The inactivity time is based on last transaction between the user's browser and the web server. A user typing information into the Add page could be counted as inactivity because the browser does not communicate with the web server until the user clicks on the "Add" button to save the information entered on the form.

The session timeout can be adjusted for each workgroup through your web server settings in Internet Information Server. Because the way a user's inactivity is determined does not account for some cases where the user is actively using ProblemTracker, it is recommended that you do not set the session timeout to less than 120 minutes.

To adjust the session timeout:

  1. Launch Internet Services Manager for IIS .
  2. Under the web site where you have installed ProblemTracker, locate the virtual directory of the workgroup you wish to modify.
  3. Right click on the virtual directory and select Properties.
  4. In the Virtual Directory tab, click on the Configuration button.
  5. Click on the App Options tab. You will find the Session Timeout option under Enable Session State. Specify a value for Session Timeout in minutes. The default is 720 minutes. It is recommended that you do not set this value to less than 120 minutes.
  6. Click OK to save your selection.
  7. Restart IIS so this new setting will take effect.