As companies continue to migrate towards hybrid and remote working environments, enterprises are flocking towards resources which can provide them with valuable insights into employee productivity. 

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Insightful activity monitoring software is one of those resources. It contains features which gather comprehensive data on when and how your workforce works, providing workforce analytics that can be leveraged extensively to improve productivity, collaboration, and communication. Plus, access to these insights also aid better infrastructure, network, and security management decisions. 

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Employee activity tracking software has proven valuable for non-profit and government organizations, as well as small businesses and large enterprises. It can be easily integrated into most systems, but what about more complex, multi-layered IT environments?

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Multi-layered, or tiered software architecture moderates the complexity of modern applications, with each layer corresponding to a different service or integration. This layered setup is especially suitable for a more agile, DevOps way of working -- which makes it a popular choice among enterprises. 

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Insightful understands your way of working; our employee activity monitoring software is highly flexible and can absolutely be integrated into your organization's multi-layered environment - no matter how complex!

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How to Integrate Insightful into Multi-layered Environments

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Let’s take a look at some common questions regarding the integration of Insightful activity monitoring software into multi-layered environments:

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My enterprise has a custom built tool for project management. It’s used by internal employees but also external clients with their own projects, tasks, and tools. Can all of my clients’ preferred tools be integrated into Insightful?

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Yes, we will copy and integrate all projects and tasks for both internal employees and external clients directly into Insightful. You will still be able to use all of your preferred tools. After the initial integration, this process will then be automated – so anytime you change or add a tool it will be reflected in your Insightful software. 

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Many external clients use our client network, can the monitoring times be adjusted manually so that clients can clock in and out only when they use our network? 

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Yes, our time and attendance feature is easily customizable and will accommodate the way your teams work. You can even schedule automatic fixed times for some employees, and add manual input for others. 

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Does Insightful offer hierarchy-based controls? For example, can I provide different access for different levels of management?

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Our internet activity monitoring software has tiered-access functionality, so you can give access individually and decide if that access will be to everyone, particular teams, or one employee. This will allow you to achieve almost any hierarchy. 

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Insightful software allows you to create roles as admins and managers. Those assigned as an admin will have access to all employees and teams, and have all permissions. For example, you could invite the head of a department to be an admin, which will give them access to all teams in their division. 

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Those assigned as managers will have access to particular teams and employees. For example, you may invite a team leader to be a manager, so they can have access to just one team or a few specific employees. All of this is customizable and catered to your exact needs. 

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My setup is pretty complex. As an example, if we have 1000 employees, they will be working on 20 projects with 50 people working on each. There may be one person responsible for all 1000 employees, multiple people responsible for 250, etc. I need all 1000 employees to be accessible to HR and senior managers at the top. But I will need another set of people to have access to only 250, and another to only 50 employees, etc. Is this level of hierarchy possible?

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Yes, you can achieve this with our management tools. You will create the smallest team (50 for example) then give access to all those teams to the top level management and to HR. Then for different departments you can give access to only 250 or so employees. From there, you can continue to give access to certain people for 50 employees under them, and so on down the line. 

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If you have another tool where you already have this organized, we can create an integration plan that will reflect your structure in our system automatically. 

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Can I custom tailor which features are accessible to different managers?

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Yes, you can choose which features are available to different managers. For example, maybe you don’t want lower level managers to have access to the screenshot feature. This can be controlled. 

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While people are working remotely they are dependent on their internet connection, which sometimes may not be working or may be slow. In this case, how is the employee activity monitoring software able to continuously function?

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Insightful saves data locally on the computer and syncs it regularly, so the only thing that wouldn’t work in this case is the real-time feature. Insightful will still save the apps and websites people are using and sync it with our servers later. Once your employee’s internet stabilizes, the data Insightful collected will show up on your dashboard.

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Regarding the back end setup of the software, what mechanism pushes the data? Is it the agent or the client that pushes the data?

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The agent pushes the data. For our database we use MongoDB and Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch keeps all the important time-related data, so we’re using it for quicker analysis and to create the data clusters. Also, all of our servers are running in containers so we are able to scale rapidly. 

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How many users can the initial setup accommodate? 

Even with one server we can support tens of thousands of employees, it just depends on the strength of the server. We have the option of a multiple tier or high availability setup, which means the system can scale on its own when it's needed, as can our databases. To accommodate an extensive user base, we'd opt for a high availability setup.

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Since Insightful operates on microservices and is container-based, is it available on-prem right away or does it need to be built?

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Our software to monitor user activity is already available on-prem. For on-prem we provide the image, so if you want to run it on one server we can send you an image which includes all the containers, so it's a one-tier setup. 

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There are also the options of a 2 or 3 tier setup, and the high availability setup. We prefer to use Kubernetes for the high availability setup but some of our clients have OpenShift. In that case, if clients have OpenShift infrastructure already set up, we just plug into that with our deployment files.

What is your default data retention policy?

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For the on-premise solution we can customize the policy to whatever you prefer. You can decide what you want to keep and for how long. We prefer to go for a setup with at least a 2-year retention. If you want more, we just extend the storage size. 

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Can higher retention data be stored offline?

Yes, for larger clients we set up the platform architecture, so that data older than 6 months will go to the warm  nodes. So it's still searchable, but a bit slower. 

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What is your list price for the license?

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Our list price for licensing on our website is for non-strategic partners. For strategic partners the pricing is flexible. One of the key factors in the pricing per license is the amount you are looking to start with and the length of the contract, both of these factors can affect the pricing positively. 

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What is your approach to piloting the software?

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Since the pilot is cloud-based it can be started at any time. It takes no time to set up, you only need to create an account. You can add as many employees as you like, keeping in mind that the more you add, the more data you’ll have to work with. Pilots are generally for one week, but there is the potential to extend the length if you feel it’s required. . 

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So, as you can see, an employee tracking solution like Insightful will complement any IT system and improve your business functions. Insightful is flexible and able to accommodate your organization’s exact needs. Get started with a free trial of Insightful today!

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