What Does Good User Activity Monitoring Software Give You? 

The internet is a wonderful thing, but it is also dangerous and distracting. There are lots of malicious websites out there hoping to get your personal details, and they pose a threat to all our personal and professional relationships. This is why you need to have user activity monitoring software in place, ensuring that you know who is doing what and when. Let’s review the key features this software should offer you.

Key Features of User Activity Monitoring Software

1. What type of activities it records. This must include the things that you are most interested in, such as the chat activities of a child or web surfing of employees. If you have children, you need to monitor their social media networks as well, but email and surfing is more likely to be of importance with employees.
2. Whether it offers remote monitoring. If it does, you have to understand how this works as well, which could be via an online login or via FTP. You may also have to install software on the machine you want monitoring, and on the machine you want to use to monitor. Make sure you know what you have to do and whether or not that is practical.
3. Whether it has stealth mode. If you are an employer, you should simply tell your employees that you monitor them. In fact, you probably have to legally. If, however, you want to monitor your teenage child, a spouse you believe is unfaithful, or any other such individual, the software has to run in the background without them knowing about it.
4. Whether you will need multiple licenses. Businesses, for instance, usually want to monitor all their employees’ computers and laptops, as well as their business phones if relevant. At home, you may have multiple children or multiple machines. You need to know whether you have to purchase more than one license for this.
5. What kind of help and support is made available. Even if you are a software engineer yourself, it is likely that you will occasionally need some help. Perhaps the software crashes, you’ve lost the software key, or you don’t understand something. You need to make sure that you can reach people to help you, and that it is easy to do this.

It is also possible to find user activity monitoring software that is actually more like a PC utility. If this is what you are looking for then you should make sure it has:

1. Counter anti-spyware protection, which means that others cannot attack you with their own spyware programs. Good software is fully protected and cannot be externally switched off without specific credentials.
2. File locks and memory erasers, as well as any other tools that stop people from being able to find sensitive information.

It is very important that you use user activity monitoring software responsibly. There is an element of an invasion of privacy involved in it, after all. This is why, particularly in the business world, you must inform your employees of it being present on their machines.