InterGuard

InterGuard starts at $8 per user per month and for that price delivers a highly customizable employee monitoring platform that's not only well featured but also a veteran in the space. That means you'll find a solid selection of standard and add-on monitoring tools as well as excellent detail in data collection and reporting. Its activity monitoring ranges across desktop and mobile, and its list of add-ons cover everything from laptop theft to data loss prevention (DLP). The trade-off is that its user interface is dated and clunky, and the product also suffered from some installation and compatibility hassles. For those reasons, it remains behind our Editors' Choice winners, ActivTrak and Teramind.

Pricing

InterGuard's pricing has some levels to it. There are different subscription modules as well as per-license costs, with discounts based on volume pricing. The primary employee monitoring module begins at $8 per user per month for the Business Cloud version. There's also an on-premises version that requires SQL Server and integrates with Active Directory (AD). All cloud products also come with a free 7-day trial and 24/7 support.

These four additional modules can be bundled together at a discount or purchased individually: Web Filtering ($2 per user per month), Data Loss Prevention ($8 per user per month), Laptop Recovery ($4 per user per month), and Mobile Monitoring ($8 per user per month). There are also a number of other licensing options and add-ons. According to the pricing page provided by the company, a single employee monitoring license costs $156, the Mobile Monitoring client for Android and iOS devices costs $150 per license, a DLP license costs $133, the Laptop Cop (laptop recovery module) costs $60 per license, and the Web Filtering module costs $29 per license. Finally, there are three additional add-ons: Geolocation for PC ($19 per license), Web Blocking for PC ($15 per license), and an Enterprise Package that includes file tracking, Dropbox and download tracking, and advanced print monitoring for an additional $14.70 per license. License prices also scale with volume discounts.

So, while InterGuard's pricing is extremely flexible to fit exactly the features and capabilities you need, it can get a bit confusing depending on the plans, add-ons, and deployment options you choose. The company also provides a return on investment (ROI) calculator to help enterprises calculate annual savings in reducing employee time waste through InterGuard.

Setup

Setting up InterGuard took some doing. On the test machine I used to simulate a monitored employee's computer, I had to log into my InterGuard administrator account and go to Settings > Download & Licensing Options and download the agent to begin the installation process. InterGuard provided instructions for this, and once downloaded, an installer window opened with additional instructions and installation tips.

The installation process itself went through the installer wizard without any hitches, completing the successful agent install within a few minutes. Once completed, InterGuard prompts the admin to check a box to delete the installer files and browsing history and commence an automatic restart in order to hand over a machine to the employee with no trace that monitoring software has been installed. However, one last step was required: an antivirus exclusion.

After the restart, I began opening websites and applications on my test machine to see how quickly InterGuard began pulling in data. Unlike Teramind, which immediately started populating its dashboards and reports with real-time data, InterGuard didn't show activity right away. This is because I hadn't initially set the antivirus exclusion. InterGuard's software is blocked by default by most antivirus providers. In the Help section on the InterGuard admin dashboard, the company provides instructions for how to manually disable this in Ad-Aware, Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, Eset, Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, Symantec, Trend Micro, Vipre, and Windows Defender Security Center (Free at Microsoft Store) .

I did my testing on a Windows 10 ($139.00 at Microsoft Store) machine, so I had to turn off real-time protection and then add a folder exclusion for the InterGuard software before the installation reset, which as I mentioned, deletes the installer files and makes the monitoring agent completely stealth on the machine. The folder path was difficult to find manually, even with the Windows 10-specific instructions. But I ultimately found the right information in the step-by-step instructions. So, if you don't set the antivirus exclusion before you complete the installation, then that machine's monitoring data will not update in InterGuard. Overall, this was far more of a hassle than installing the Teramind agent, and speaks to the deeper compatibility issues of getting older tools such as InterGuard and Veriato 360 up and running compared to newer tools.

Employee Monitoring

Once your admin UI begins populating with employee monitoring data, InterGuard is designed to not only oversee what's going on within your organization but engage in internal threat protection. Using alerts, automated policies, and selection of powerful administrative tools, the product keeps a company's network secure by stopping employees from, for instance, sending or receiving files or visiting insecure websites or apps. As with Teramind, the InterGuard admin can switch between stealth and investigative mode for a computer's agent, and thus be able to choose whether the monitoring software operates incognito on a user's machine or whether they're aware of the oversight.

The UI is not the most intuitive or aesthetically pleasing but is relatively easy to navigate once you get the hang of it. The Welcome dashboard gives you a quick glance at how much of your allotted data viewing period, data storage, smart camera screenshots, licenses, notifications, and reports you've used and have left. There are also tabs to open your activity log as well as to quickly configure various settings. The main navigation menu on the left-hand side is broken down into six primary tabs: Dashboard, Datalock, Help, Laptop Cop, Notifications, Recorded Data, and Settings. There are also links on top of the screen to open live chat, the InterGuard knowledge base, or submit a Help ticket.

The Dashboard tab at the top gives you a few different views. The Activity dashboard is a pretty basic time tracking data visualization that shows the activity windows during which a particular user, group, or computer was active in a given timeframe. There's also a Widgets dashboard, which you can customize with basic bar, line, pie, or table charts. InterGuard offers more than 40 different metrics depending on the widgets you'd like to add, including website and app stats to screenshots and policy violations. While my single test agent didn't provide enough data to fill out the whole dashboard, it's a nifty custom view. However, it's not as advanced in its data visualizations as the Focus and Risk dashboards in Teramind. There's also a Reports dashboard, which we'll get to later.

There is a large array of data types you can capture with InterGuard. The Recorded Data tab opens into an extensive list of folders and monitoring pages for all of the main employee monitoring vectors your organization wants to track. First off, InterGuard tracks all email messages received and sent on the system, and syncs with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers, either open in the browser or installed as an app. InterGuard captures the text of the email as well as any attachment, and you can also configure Alert Words to trigger additional recording or notifications.

Alert Words are a powerful keyword tracking feature, also found in Teramind, in which you can configure a list of words and phrases to trigger automated actions, alerts, or reports. So, if you wanted to know any time an employee used the last name of your company's CEO, then simply create an Alert Word. To test this, I scrolled down into the Alert Words tab of the Settings menu where you can both add new categories as well as specific tracked words. When adding a new Alert Word, I could also choose from "regular expressions" such as street or email addresses, phone numbers, and even credit card or social security numbers. This level of privacy invasion found in InterGuard, Teramind, and Veriato 360 can be unsettling, particularly with targeted monitoring of employees' personal and financial data. However, just because these features are there, doesn't mean your business needs to use them.

Targeted keyword searches are not limited to emails. It doesn't matter if an Alert Word is triggered in a browser window, a chat or instant messaging (IM) app, a screenshot, or even a physical keystroke: InterGuard will pick it up. The IMs/Chats and Keystrokes sections are also found under the Recorded Data menu on the left-hand side. InterGuard supports some legacy apps such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger, but also captures Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Skype, and Skype for Business messages. There are also dedicated Social Media Data tabs for Twitter and YouTube. InterGuard said it adds new chat app support on a per-client basis and as tools become more popular. The company is currently looking to add support for Slack (Visit Site at Slack) .

Each Recorded Data page is structured the same way: with a sparse, column-based UI that shows monitoring data in the middle of the screen and filter options above; this lets you drill down to a specific user or group and specify a given timeframe. This is also true of screenshots, though InterGuard's Smart Camera feature does have some nifty capabilities.

Screenshots can be taken over any specified interval, be it every 30 seconds or every few minutes, and the smart camera module doesn't just capture the screen as a whole. InterGuard lets you monitor specific apps or websites and take targeted screen capture images within the screen itself. Teramind and Veriato 360 have in-depth screenshots as well but neither gives admins quite as much control as InterGuard's Smart Camera feature.

Screenshots and keystroke data also accompanies all app and browser monitoring data to provide the full context of what a user was typing or doing. InterGuard stores data chronologically in a timeline view once you drill down into a specific user, group, or computer. Groups are also a built-in internal privacy tool, as an admin can designate a manager to oversee a specific group and only that group. This way, they're not seeing any monitoring data beyond what they're supposed to see.

Finally, InterGuard also performs full file tracking and monitors all printed documents. In the Recording & Blocking settings tab, I was able to switch various monitoring vectors on and off, such as recording files and printed documents (this is also where you set screenshot intervals and turn Investigative Mode on and off). InterGuard is fully configurable in terms of the file paths or drives an admin wants to monitor. The File/User Tracking menu in the Recorded Data section breaks down data by documents, Dropbox files, downloads, logon events, print screenshots, USB, and webmail attachments. So, if someone has a Dropbox client installed or inserts a USB device, then InterGuard will scan the files with an option to download and view. This goes for email attachments as well though, unlike in Teramind, you can't perform a full optical character recognition (OCR) scan of the documents themselves to run keyword searches and additional monitoring. You can download and view any captured files but the system will only scan the file name and include the file path and timestamp data.

Notifications and Reports

InterGuard also has customizable reporting for the wide range of monitoring data it collects, which you configure via a helpful wizard. There are both pre-set reports and custom reports. When I chose the pre-set option in the Report wizard, I was able to choose from the same 40-plus widgets available in the dashboard, choose the type of data visualization I wanted in the report (bar, line, pie, or table), and then order the widgets any way I wanted. For example, I created an Employee Activity Report in which I could pull in metrics such as "Allowed Websites by Duration and Most Visited," "IM Active Time by Client," "Top Applications Used," and "Top Screenshots by Website or Application Trigger."

Next, the wizard prompted me to designate the specific departments or user groups on which I wanted to run the report, the timeframe from which to pull data (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly), the file type I want the report exported as (Excel, JPEG, or PDF), and the email recipients who should receive the report. You can also choose the Custom Report option, which lets you get a bit more granular. Here, I was able to choose from Investigative Reports (to find recorded data types or activity logs from a specific user) or other options such as a Daily User Behavior Report and an Idle Time Report on particular user groups or the organization as a whole. I then went through the same report wizard to customize and send the report. In either scenario, the whole process only took a few minutes using the wizard and was extremely intuitive.

Notifications and automated policies are also configured through the same wizard-based process. In the Notifications tab found below "Recorded Data" in the left-hand menu, you can see a list of active notifications and can create a new one by opening the wizard. The main notification categories you can set up are for Alert Words, website categories, or user behavior frequency. If you've bought the DataLock add-on for DLP, then you can also set up a policy violation notification or a "Pending Override" notification for an active policy. Alert Words and website categories are all custom so you can configure these notifications based on any specific word or website groupings you've set up. You can then go through the rest of the wizard to select timeframe, departments, and recipients. While Teramind and Veriato 360 also offer comprehensive reporting and boast better customizable dashboards, InterGuard's report and notification wizards were the best we tested for quickly building reports and automated trigger workflows from scratch.

The Whole Monitoring Package

There's not a whole lot InterGuard can't do. We didn't test the Laptop Cop and DataLock products for this employee monitoring review. But along the other add-on modules, they add even more premium functionality to the InterGuard platform. DataLock is fully configurable DLP software that can set automated policies to prevent the files from being transferred through means not sanctioned by IT or prevent any data or file transmission that matches a policy. Laptop Cop is primarily used for data recovery if a machine is lost or stolen. It can remotely delete all files with a particular extension or associated with specific folders or simply wipe the computer. Laptop Cop can also lock down a workstation and make it unusable though, unlike Teramind, it cannot take full remote desktop control of the machine.

How much InterGuard does for your organization simply depends upon which add-ons you need and how deeply you customize the software. Mobile capabilities are another useful add-on, with the Mobile Monitoring app giving admins quick data access and monitoring dashboards on Android and iOS. Along with Veriato 360 and Editors' Choice ActivTrak (Free at ActivTrak) , InterGuard is among the most powerful employee monitoring tools we tested in this roundup. While the user experience (UX), agent installation, and advanced monitoring functionality are not as slick and seamless as Teramind (60.00 Per Month for Up to 5 Users for the Starter Edition at Teramind) , InterGuard is a comprehensive, extremely customizable employee monitoring tool.

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