Secure Global Desktop Administration Guide > Getting started > Understanding webtop and emulator sessions
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You can keep track of what your users are doing by monitoring the webtop sessions and emulator sessions in progress.
A webtop session begins when a user logs in to Secure Global Desktop. How the user logs in, the username and password they type, determines the type of user they are. In turn, this determines the behavior of the user's webtop session. There are two cases:
| Anonymous/shared account | Others |
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| The webtop session ends when a user logs out or closes their web browser. | The webtop session ends when a user logs out. |
| If the user is already logged in, logging in again creates a new webtop session. No existing webtop sessions are affected. | If the user is already logged in, logging in again will relocate the webtop session: the old webtop session ends. |
Webtop sessions are hosted by the Secure Global Desktop array member the user logs in to.
In Object Manager, person objects, profile objects and host objects have a Sessions tab. This shows all the webtop sessions involving the object: for example, all the webtop sessions involving a particular profile object.
On the Sessions tab you can view details about each webtop session and log a user out of Secure Global Desktop by ending their webtop session.
You can also use the tarantella
webtopsession
command to manipulate webtop sessions from the command line.
An emulator session begins when a user starts an application and usually ends only when the application exits.
As with webtop sessions, the type of user influences the behavior of emulator sessions. For anonymous or shared users, emulator sessions always end when the webtop session ends. For other users, emulator sessions may persist between webtop sessions.
An emulator session is hosted by an array member. Each emulator session has a corresponding Protocol Engine process, which communicates between the client device and the application server. The Protocol Engine converts the display protocol used by the application to the Adaptive Internet Protocol, AIP, understood by Secure Global Desktop components on the client device.
You can use emulator session load balancing to spread the load of the Protocol Engines among the Secure Global Desktop servers in the array.
Each emulator session corresponds to an application currently running through Secure Global Desktop.
Emulator session resumability lets users stop using an application at any time, and resume it later on any client device. The application continues running when it's not displayed, so, for example, you can start a lengthy calculation, shut down your client device, and come back to the application later from any other client device to pick up the results.
Each application object has a Resumable attribute that determines an application's resumability.
An emulator session can be suspended at any time by user action (such as closing the web browser), or through an unscheduled event such as a communications failure.
Resumable applications are useful for these reasons:
In Object Manager, application objects, host objects and person objects have a Sessions tab. This shows all the emulator sessions involving the object: for example, all the applications a person is running, or all those running on a particular application server.
On the Sessions tab you can view details about each emulator session, and end or shadow sessions. Shadowing a session lets you and the user see and interact with the application at the same time.
Note You can only shadow Windows and X applications.
You can also use the tarantella emulatorsession
command to manipulate emulator sessions from the command line.
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