What is Idle Time Tracking?

What is Idle Time Tracking?

BrowseReporter can measure how long your users are away from their computers based on their mouse and keyboard movement. In most situations, when there is no movement from a user’s mouse or keyboard for a long period of time, their computer is considered idle. When this happens, BrowseReporter will shift the tracking from Active Time to Idle Time.



Including Idle time in your report

When you run your reports, you have the option to include idle time in them. By checking this option, the report will add idle time on top of the users’ active time.

For example, let’s assume a user was browsing on Facebook.com for 5 minutes and was idled for 25 minutes. When you include Idle time, the report will show 30 minutes of Active Time. When you don’t include Idle Time, the report will show 5 minutes of Active Time.

Here are some scenarios where you should not include idle time in your report because it will skew the report by adding more time when your users were away from their computers.

  • When a user forgets to log out of their computer after office hours and the computer doesn’t go into sleep or stand by.
  • When a user is taking a break away from their computer and left their Internet browser or windows application running indefinitely.

Here are some scenarios where you should include idle time in your report because your users were working on their computer without touching the mouse or keyboard.

  • When a user is watching long form video content.
  • When a user is attending a webinar.
  • When a user is leaving their computer on to listen to music.

Configuring Idle Time Tracking

By default, idle time is enabled when you install CurrentWare BrowseReporter version 6.0.2 or higher. The default setting for idle time tracking is after 5 minutes of inactivity.

To change this setting, on the Web CurrentWare Console:

  1. Go to the Settings> BrowseReporter menu > Tracking Options
  2. Choose to enable idle Time Tracking and customize the idle timer to your needs.


Want other ways to see idle time:
Timeline View


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