User Session Definition

To help you understand what your users did to run into a problem, SessionStack collects the following information that is reproduced as a video:

  • Browser state changes
  • HTML changes
  • Mouse events
  • Keyboard events
  • Touch events
  • Scroll events
  • User navigation

Each tracked event is saved in our database and then reconstructed in chronological order. The SessionStack JavaScript snippet records your users as they visit different pages, allowing you to playback the entire session.

SessionStack automatically hides sensitive data such as credit card numbers, personal identification numbers, passwords, etc. This means that no actual data leaves the browser of the user. Additionally, you can mark elements as sensitive by adding CSS selectors in the settings of your project.
See how →

A session starts once a user lands on a page within your product and ends whenever there is a period of user inactivity longer than 30 minutes. The session includes the user’s actions such as mouse clicks, keystrokes, scroll and navigation events across multiple browser tabs. In case the user revisits the product after a 30-min period of inactivity, their actions will be recorded as a new session. If the user only switches between the browser tabs, and no user activity is registered when they briefly land on the recorded tab, SessionStack will not start recording a new session.

For example, a user registers an account and lands on your product’s home page. In your SessionStack project, once you choose to play the session, it will start with the landing page, and continue until they have not performed any activity within your product in the past 30 minutes.

A user is considered "active" when they perform any of the following types of user action events:

  • Mouse events
  • Keyboard events
  • Touch events
  • Scroll
  • Navigate (in-tab and cross-tab)

If the user is interacting with the page with any of the above user action events, SessionStack should classify that part of the session as active.

Processing time for session recordings typically takes less than a minute, with event indexing taking less than 10 seconds. A range of time within a session is considered inactive if it's been three seconds since the last user action event. The inactive part of the session will show up as black in the player timeline, as opposed to green for the active parts.


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