Your AngelTrack server has a Heartbeat page that shows you all current web activity for all users.
From the Settings page, you can click the "Heartbeat" item to view your AngelTrack server's current workload from all users. This knowledgebase article explains the meaning of all the diagnostic indicators shown on the Heartbeat display.
Each row in the Heartbeat page is a session, which is a web browser somewhere in the world. Usually, all of a browser's open tabs share one session.
Column: Username
The Username column shows the login name, if any, of the session.
The column shows "friend" if the session is from a web browser that has successfully logged-in at any point in the past year; otherwise, it shows "stranger". This is part of the Fort Knox Security Mode., which allows you to forbid login to strangers i.e. to any web browser that has never logged in before.
The column also shows the number of times that the session's login name has changed, i.e. the number of times that the browser switches user accounts. Normally that happens only once, at login, when the browser switches from not-logged-in to a certain user account. This counter is used for diagnostic purposes when a station's internet gateway device is suspected of malfunctioning and mixing up the requests of different computers.
Column: Employee ID
This column shows the AngelTrack employee ID of the logged-in user; or if no one has yet logged-in, then it shows a negative number used by AngelTrack Support for diagnostic purposes.
Like the Username column, this column also shows the number of times that the session changes its logged-in employee ID, for the same reasons.
Column: IP Address
This column contains the source IP address of the session. You can click the address to look it up and see its approximate location on Earth.
This column also indicates whether the browser is a mobile browser versus a desktop browser, and the number of times that the session has changed its IP address. IP address changes are common when a mobile device is traveling across town.
Column: Last 3 Minutes of Activity
This column shows the session's complex requests for the past three minutes. A complex request is a web request for any of AngelTrack's regular pages, or for any of its APIs; this excludes simple requests, such downloads of images, icons, scripts, stylesheets, exported files, and so forth.
For each completed request in the list, the total response time is shown, in milliseconds. This time interval includes the time needed for the browser to transmit its request over the internet, as well as the time needed for the browser to retrieve AngelTrack's reply, therefore this number could go very high (2 or 5 or 10 or even 30 seconds) if the browser is in the back of an ambulance where it has a poor signal.
If you would like to dig deeper into your server's workload, number of sessions, and response times, you can visit the Performance Monitor page, which is accessible from the "Diagnostics" item at the bottom of the Settings page.
The Cause of "Stranger" Sessions
From time to time you might see a "stranger" / "not logged in" session. These can occur for many reasons, including:
- An employee connecting to AngelTrack for the very first time on a new mobile device;
- An employee connecting to AngelTrack again after clearing their browser history and cookies;
- Search engines and bots harmlessly probing your server to see what it is;
- Hackers probing your server for vulnerabilities;
- Hackers attempting to guess passwords by using a list of commonly-used password cleartexts (few people know that AngelTrack automatically forbids any user from choosing a password on the list of the most commonly used passwords); or
- A hundred other oddball reasons why someone might ping or investigate your server.
To learn more about AngelTrack's security defenses against such things, please refer to the AngelTrack Security Guide.
You can reduce, but not eliminate, your AngelTrack server's attack surface by using Fort Knox Mode, however that brings with it a minor ongoing hassle whenever an employee begins using a new mobile device.