Teramind

Teramind (which begins at $60 per month for up to five users) delivers a strong showing in the employee monitoring space with deep monitoring features and impressive embedded reporting and analytics. It brings features that many others in the product category neglect to offer, including deep alerting and automation. We found that InterGuard and Veriato 360 offer strong monitoring features and customization options, but they're not up to the level of excellence that Teramind delivers with its responsive user interface (UI) and usability. With volume-based user pricing that is reasonably in line with its competitors along with several privacy features, Teramind is a clear pick for our Editors' Choice honor.

Pricing and Setup

For cloud access, Teramind begins at a $60 flat fee per month for up to five users with a slightly truncated feature set that focuses on live monitoring, screen recording, as well as web and app tracking. You can try this out via a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. After this Starter edition, Teramind has an edition called UAM (which stands for User Activity Monitoring) that runs $125 per month for up to five users. This UAM edition extends the platforms capabilities to user activity monitoring, audit, forensics, as well as enforcing user-configurable policies and rules. Finally, there's the DLP edition (which adds data loss protection). This edition costs $150 per month for up to 5 users, and grows the feature set to include content-based data exfiltration rules.

For users beyond those first five, Teramind offers scaled, per-user pricing (meaning the number of employees being tracked), with volume discounts for its cloud-hosted solution. Teramind's website shows both monthly and annual pricing depending on the user count. For instance, 10 users on Teramind UAM costs $250 per month or $2,500 per year with an annual discount, 25 users costs $625 per month or $6,250 per year, 50 users costs $1,250 per month or $12,500 per year, and 100 users costs $2,500 per month or $22,

In April 2018, Teramind introduced the aforementioned Teramind DLP edition, which adds data loss protection (DLP). For 10 users, the cloud edition costs $300 per month or $3,000 per year. The on-premises edition of Teramind DLP costs $1,500 per year for 10 endpoints.

Setting up a Teramind account was simple. Once I signed up for a trial account, Teramind sent me a verification email message that opened to a setup page. The sign-up was followed swiftly by an email from an account executive, with instructions and tutorials for installing agents and setting up the administrator dashboard.

Right off the bat, Teramind asks whether you want your users to know they're being monitored. Unlike Veriato 360 , in which the agent is always hidden, Teramind gives the admin the option to provide a revealed agent for contractors, freelancers, remote workers, etc., to log hours and be monitored only when they're working for your company. You can flip the switch in Settings anytime to make the agent visible or invisible. For the revealed agent, Teramind gives you a link for a direct client install. For the hidden client, there's a quick YouTube video that walks you through setup and install.

For PCMag's testing, I installed a hidden agent. Teramind will send out a link for a direct download and install, after which point there is no further setup required on the monitored device. Once the install was completed, that computer immediately showed up with real-time data on my admin dashboard. I could even jump directly into the live feed of my monitored user's screen. Setup couldn't be easier.

Employee Monitoring

The Teramind admin UI walks the difficult tightrope between offering an impressive command center of precise monitoring features, dashboards, and reports while still making the experience easy to navigate and simple to customize. As opposed to the clunkier, more menu-heavy UIs of similar enterprise-grade monitoring platforms such as InterGuard (8.00 Per User Per Month at InterGuard) and Veriato 360, Teramind features a modern, responsive, cloud-based portal that packs plenty of complexity into a minimalist, intuitive UI.

When you first log in, Teramind takes you to its "Focus Dashboard" which can be configured with widgets to show anything from your entire organization to a particular department or user group. Customized by date range on the top left-hand side, admins can press the Add Widgets button to pull in dozens of different widgets that give you at-a-glance reports and data visualizations on monitoring, productivity, or security metrics. For instance, I was able to add monitoring widgets for application, web, and network usage; a list of online employees, a keystroke log, and productivity widgets for tracking activity categories, task, or project hours. I also added a monitoring widget for payroll charts that map productivity to an employee or department's allocated payroll.

In addition to the Focus Dashboard, there are three other default dashboards. The first is an Enterprise dashboard that's focused on security and productivity metrics for C-suite executives. The second's a Productivity dashboard that tracks stats such as idle and active time, and productive and unproductive websites. The third is a Risk dashboard that shows rules and policy violations and user activity that could be categorized as "at-risk." The Risk dashboard is sortable by departments, severity, custom tags, or Teramind's custom "risk score" that quantifies employee behaviors into whether they pose organizational or security risks to your network. You can also build a dashboard from scratch.

The dashboards are all found in tabs atop the left-hand navigation menu, along with a Time Tracking tab with features such as web clock-in and project/task tracking. Teramind isn't as focused on time tracking as pure play vendors HubStaff ($7.00 Per Month at Hubstaff) and Time Doctor. But the core functionality is there for monitoring work hours of full-time employees, remote workers, contractors and freelancers, or anyone on a company's system.

Most of the action happens in the Monitoring tab. Here, you'll find a list of reports with deep data breakdowns of the primary monitoring metrics the agent is picking up. You can monitor metrics such as webpages and apps visited, emails (in services like Gmail or Outlook) sent and received, file transfers (through a USB or other attached storage), instant messaging (Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Skype, and WhatsApp Web), keystrokes, web searches, screenshots, session mining, network monitoring, as well as exported video and any documents or files that have been printed.

Everything in Teramind is indexed. On the Web Pages & Applications list, you'll see a bar chart of the most active apps and then a timestamped breakdown of the employee, computer, what process or URL they opened, visit duration, and the app or webpage title. More importantly (and this goes for any data point, be it an email, web activity, chat, search, etc.), there's a small Video icon next to each entry that pulls up what Teramind calls "Historic Playback Mode." It's essentially a video player for the seconds or minutes in time when a user was engaged in a particular activity. It lets you rewind and fast-forward, take additional screenshots, download the video, and see any alerts or notifications triggered during the session. Teramind also supports microphone and headphone recording in both Historic Playback and Live View modes for call centers and other audio-heavy job functions.

All of these monitoring tools are available in a macro view in the Monitoring tab, which can be filtered down by department, user group, or any other aggregated categories you've customized. However, I found it was also easy to do in-depth monitoring of particular users or machines by clicking into the Employees or Computers tab. Teramind is big on forensics, meaning the ability to track an incident before and after it occurs, identify risky or rule-breaking behaviors, and quickly follow a user's digital fingerprints. The Focus and Risk dashboards, historic playback, and monitoring tools mentioned all factor into this. However, once you identify a particular user or computer on which you want to check up, clicking into that employee or machine's profile brings up another self-contained dashboard.

On the page with the test computer I monitored for my testing, there were tabs across the top for Activity, Alerts, Emails, File Transfers, Live Montage (which took me directly into a real-time screen feed), Snapshots, and Network Monitoring. There are also On/Off buttons to start and stop monitoring and to remotely uninstall the agent from the user's PC. If you go to the Employee profile instead of the Computer profile, then there are also tabs for Keystrokes, Printing, Session Log, and Time Worked. You see the same filter options and activity log details for open apps and websites, with associated screenshots and video. You can configure screenshots to be taken at any custom interval. Finally, Teramind also has a fail-safe feature that lets an admin take full remote desktop control over a machine. InterGuard offers remote data wipe and lockdown features through its Laptop Cop add-on, but it doesn't give you the full control Teramind does.

Automation and Alerting

Aside from the most extensive monitoring features and the best user experience (UX) of all the tools in this roundup, Teramind also stands out through its automation and alerting. In the Behavior tab of the Admin menu on the left-hand side, you can set alerts, behavior rules, and what Teramind calls "anomaly rules." These rules trigger alerts when an employee deviates from normal behavior.

While InterGuard and Veriato 360 also feature automated policy and alert triggers, Teramind is the only tool we tested that has a complete automation layer woven into the rest of the product and integrated into reporting modules such as the Risk dashboard. In Behavior Rules, for instance, there were already default rules set up for when an employee exceeds their daily time limit on social media, if they print a large document, or if they use a cloud storage provide that's not sanctioned by IT.

In my testing, I wanted try out the rules to determine the effectiveness of the automation features. So I opened Netflix and YouTube and started watching videos, and then started browsing Facebook and Twitter. Once I hit the 15-minute activity cap, an email automatically showed up in my inbox (from the admin) that notified me of the policy violation. This also showed up immediately on the Risk dashboard. You can also add filter rules to specify whether rules do or do not apply to specific departments, projects, or users. For example, you wouldn't want to impose the social media activity cap on your company's social media manager.

Anomaly rules are a bit different. Teramind gives you more than 200 templates from which to choose when setting up a new one related to apps, emails, file operations, IMs, networking, printing, user activity, or websites. You then define who the rule includes and excludes and set up what triggers the rule.

When setting up a "website usage anomaly" rule, I could decide, for instance, that if a user is idle in an app for too long or if they go to a website without an HTTP connection, I could set up baseline and trigger conditions to notify an administrator with a real-time or a daily/weekly email report. I could also set it up to block that website or stop an email from being sent. This is a good, automated way to enforce productivity or security rules. After setting one up for social media usage based on the previously triggered activity cap, I then received an email from the admin when I reloaded YouTube. The message said, "You have exceeded social media usage for the day" and it blocked the website. These rules can also be set to only be enforced during work hours in cases where a remote employee may be using the machine after they've clocked out.

Another feature that neither InterGuard nor Veriato 360 have is live optical character recognition (OCR) on a user's screen. Regardless of whether a particular chat app is supported, Teramind can analyze any text appearing onscreen, index it, and then let you set up automated keyword alerts and rules if employees type or view the keyword. Teramind even lets you set a rule risk level (i.e., low, moderate, high, or critical) with associated triggers to modulate the automated workflow, depending on the severity of a rule violation.

Privacy, Compliance, and Access Control

When it comes to an employee monitoring tool as powerful and far-reaching into user activity as Teramind, it's also important to discuss what the tool does to maintain privacy, compliance, and access control. Teramind has an Audit tab that an admin can check to see which managers have been looking at what information. In the Settings tab, there is an Access Control policy engine to set rules regarding what people with dashboard access can see and what features they have access to. You can also ensure that a manager of the finance department can't see what employees in the HR department are doing.

Teramind also lets you turn agent visibility on and off, which is important for compliance purposes. In Europe, employers are required to notify employees if they are being monitored (this is not required in the U.S.). The tool also takes steps to ensure the privacy of employees' personal or financial data, such as letting you set up policies to cease monitoring and keystroke logging when users visit a bank's website or when they're entering a personal password. These safeguards may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to the disquieting level of oversight Teramind can afford admins given free rein. But businesses should look for an employee monitoring tool that contains these checks against unfettered, omniscient, Big Brother-like monitoring.

The Teramind DLP edition combines DLP with behavioral data analytics. Users can protect data through a process of file transformation that involves encryption, compression, or file extraction. Managers use a dashboard to analyze user data and choose which data is most important to track. Then they receive real-time alerts of behavior that matches up with a behavior they're watching.

Teramind has only been around since 2014, but its feature set and monitoring tools equals and even eclipses that of veteran rivals InterGuard and Veriato 360, while offering competitive, scale-based pricing. The young tool also boasts the best UX, the smoothest agent installation, and the most advanced automation capabilities of any employee monitoring tool we tested. Teramind can do it all. It is our clear Editors' Choice pick as the most comprehensive, easy-to-use employee monitoring tool on the market. It's truly an all-seeing eye.

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