Recording storage and log levels

When your plan includes them, Blink records every screen a technician watches (Session recording), keeps a transcript of every remote terminal (Terminal history) and keeps a timeline and log of every session (Session timeline). These are part of Blink Pro. See Blink Core and Blink Pro. This page covers how long they are kept and who can reach them. To find and play recordings, see Use Blink.

If your plan changes, recordings, transcripts and session logs you already have stay available: people with the permissions below can still play, download and delete them, and the retention settings on this page still apply to them. A session started without recording or a timeline stays without one.

Who can see recordings and logs

Access to recordings and logs comes from roles. The permissions are:

• View recordings, Download recordings and Delete recordings, each for Own sessions (the ones the person started) or Any session they can reach.
• View logs, for session and device logs and the timeline.
• Change log levels, to change an agent’s live log levels.

Deleting recordings removes a session’s video and audio; the session and its log stay. To delete a whole ended Support session with its recording and log, a person needs Delete support sessions.

See Roles and permissions to build a role with exactly these.

How long recordings are kept

On Blink Cloud

Recording storage limits are part of your Blink Cloud service. Contact IZT to change them.

On your own server

By default, a self-hosted Blink server keeps recordings forever. You can limit them with two server start-up options:

Option	What it does
-recording-retention-days	Finished recordings older than this many days are deleted. The check runs daily. 0 (the default) keeps them forever.
-recording-quota-mb	The most storage, in MiB, that recordings and terminal transcripts may use. Over it, the oldest finished recordings are deleted. 0 (the default) means no limit.

Add the options to the command that starts your Blink server and restart it. See Install for how your server is started.

Plan for about 1 GB of storage per hour of recording, per monitor watched. To work out how much disk space you need, see Plan storage for recordings.

Caution

Deleted recordings can’t be recovered. If you need recordings for compliance, download them before they reach the retention limit.

How long session logs are kept

Session and device logs are kept for:

• 30 days for records at Info level and above.
• 3 days for Debug and Trace records.

On your own server, you can change these with the -log-retention and -log-debug-retention start-up options, as a duration such as 720h. 0 keeps records forever. A change applies to new records only.

Records written while diagnostic mode is on are kept as long as Info records, whatever their level.

Change an agent’s log levels

When IZT support or your own team needs more detail to diagnose a problem, you can turn up the logging of one agent without touching the customer’s computer. To turn it up for every session and device at once, use diagnostic mode. You need the Change log levels permission.

You can do this for:

• An Access device: on the device’s details, select Log levels.
• A live session: on the session’s log page, select Log levels. You can’t change levels after the session has ended.

In the Log levels dialog:

1. Choose a preset: Normal, Debug all, Media, Input, Backstage or Install. Or set the Default level and the level of individual components yourself.
2. For a device, choose Revert after: 1 hour, 24 hours (the default), 7 days or Never.
3. Select Apply.

The dialog shows the Current levels, and for a device, when they revert. Choose Normal to go back to the usual level.

Tip

Records below a component’s level are not stored, but the agent still keeps recent detailed records in memory and sends them along when an error occurs. You often get enough detail without turning levels up.

Caution

Debug all can produce a large volume of records. Remember that Debug records are only kept for 3 days.