Does the User Session Log Report actually mean anything?
I had a user that got the Max Users message when logging in, so I checked the aforementioned report. It showed that we never came close to the max users. And the user inquestion had some very strange entries in the report.
My main question is if the Session Length column is even meaningful. From the snippet below, you see many entries that have a session time of 2d 22h 52m 02s, even though the math never adds up. In fact, none of the differences between the Start and End times result in the 2d 22:52:02 duration.
If you were to go into the Admin Console and look under Sessions and select the additional option to Show All sessions (Which will display Active and Available Sessions) you will find suspended sessions that are available. After discussing with Epicor Support, there is no means of setting an automated process to clear out any of those suspended sessions. This came into play because our CFO wanted an activity report when we had a lot of users working from home.
Some individuals seem to rarely ever log out of Epicor properly, and so they keep reconnecting to their previous session day after day, until I go into the Admin Console and manually delete all “Available” sessions.
Other users seem to end up with multiple sessions - especially those who switch between companies (A/R & A/P clerks primarily).
That’s why you ended up seeing that 2 Days, 22 Hours, 52 Minutes and 02 Seconds. The person’s “Available” sessions were closed out on 8/17 at 9:03:50 AM. From my experience, that only occurs in one of three instances: 1. App Server Reboot, 2. Manual Deletion of Available Sessions, or 3. The person finally logged out of Epicor properly.
Whenever you get an error regarding available licenses, go into the Admin Console and delete out all of the “Available” sessions. If you’re hosted on the cloud, you likely need Hosted Support to do that for you.
I took a screen shot from our Admin Console to illustrate.
In answer to your “Main Question” I find the session report to not be very useful at all, other than it gives me an idea as to who is active. The only real tool is the Sessions listed in the Admin Console.
Word of warning: If someone is active in Epicor, and you delete their so-called “Available” session, they’ll get error messages; and will have to close Epicor and log back in. That very first session in my screenshot is my active session… as to why it is showing as “Available” instead of “In Use” is a complete mystery onto me. Epicor’s Session logging and tracking is nearly useless.
Most of our people work remotely using RDS. And our server is set to disconnect the RDS session after 15 minutes of inactivity. But when they reconnect to RDS, it doesn’t reconnect to those orphaned sessions.
Our Users are set to the 15 Minute Timeout as well; and even our On Premises users don’t seem to always reconnect, nor do the Available Sessions always clear out properly. I took the added step of unchecking the “Allow Multiple Sessions” checkbox for most of our Users except for those that I know log onto multiple workstations throughout the day, which is just a handful of our Shipping Clerks as they’re processing shipments.
Even with the not allowing Multiple Sessions, however, I still see multiple sessions throughout the day (was worse when working remotely from home), but still see it happening inside the network.
I will say this: it’s much improved over E-9. We were constantly running into licensing issues with E-9 where I worked before. E-10 seems to handle the orphaned sessions a little bit better - but still doesn’t function as one would logically expect it to function. There’s a lot of room for improvement on Epicor’s end.
I was referring to the RDS settings - on our server. But now that I think of it, the License Timeout setting on the user’s in E10 is also 15 minutes.
FWIW - the original problem was solved by deleting the file CustomContextMenu_<username>.xml
in \\<appserver>\c$\ProgramData\Epicor\<appserver>-808\3.2.300.0\MC\shared
Somehow that XML file was created, but had no contents.
