What gets recorded
Privileged session recording captures administrative activity as it happens: a video-like replay of RDP screens, the full terminal output of SSH sessions, and typically the keystrokes and commands entered along the way. Because the recording happens at the gateway or proxy that brokers the session, it works regardless of which tools the administrator uses on the target system.
Recordings are stored centrally with metadata such as the user, target system, account used, start and end times and any approval that authorized the session. Keystroke and command indexing makes the archive searchable, so an investigator can find every session in which a specific command was run rather than watching hours of footage.
Why it matters
Logs on the target system tell you that an admin account logged in; a session recording shows you exactly what that person did. This closes the accountability gap created by shared accounts, third-party contractors and remote vendors, where the login alone does not identify the individual or their actions.
Recording also changes behavior. Administrators who know sessions are recorded are less likely to take shortcuts, and disputes about what happened during an outage or a change window can be settled by replaying the session. For compliance, frameworks covering financial systems, cardholder data and critical infrastructure increasingly expect demonstrable oversight of privileged activity, and session recordings are among the strongest evidence available.
Implementing session recording
The practical route is to force privileged sessions through a broker that records them, rather than installing capture software on every server. Access to targets is then restricted so sessions that bypass the broker are blocked or flagged. Teams define retention periods to balance forensic value against storage cost, and restrict who may replay recordings, since the recordings themselves are sensitive.
It is good practice to pair recording with real-time controls, such as the ability to watch a live session and terminate it if something looks wrong. Platforms like Monopam record video and keystrokes for browser-based RDP and SSH sessions at the gateway, so no agents are needed on the target systems.