How to audit which managers monitored which agents

The Real-Time Monitoring Log Report records every listen-in session a manager starts — who listened, to whom, from which server, and for how long. Here is what the report contains and how to use it for compliance and accountability.

When a manager opens the real-time report and clicks into an Agent session to listen in, VICIdial writes a record to the monitoring log. That log is searchable by date range, campaign, manager, or agent — and it gives you a column-by-column account of every session. This post walks through what each column means and how to use the report for compliance checks and accountability reviews.

Who can run this report

The Real-Time Monitoring Log Report is restricted to level 9 users and users with Admin Utilities privileges. A regular manager or Agent cannot pull it. If you need to grant access without giving full level 9 rights, enabling Admin Utilities on a lower-level user account is the targeted way to do it.

What the report records

Each row in the report corresponds to one monitoring session — from the moment the manager clicked listen to the moment they stopped. The columns are:

Start Time and End Time — the wall-clock timestamps bracketing the session.
Length — total seconds the monitoring session ran.
Manager — the user ID of the person who initiated monitoring, plus the IP address of the server they were watching from (Manager Server) and the IP of their own workstation (Manager IP).
Manager Phone — the phone login the manager used to bridge into the call audio.
Agent Monitored — the agent ID and name of the person being listened to.
Agent Server — the IP address of the server the agent's phone was operating from at the time.
Agent Status — the dialer status of the agent the moment monitoring began (for example, INCALL or PAUSE).
Lead ID — the ID of the contact the agent was speaking with when monitoring started. If the agent was not on a call at that moment, this column shows -0-.
Campaign — the campaign ID the monitored agent was working at the time.
Type — the kind of monitoring session the manager ran (listen-only, whisper, barge-in, depending on what your deployment supports).

Searching and sorting the results

The search form lets you filter by a date range, a specific Campaign, a specific manager user ID, or a specific agent user ID. You can combine filters — for instance, all sessions where manager X listened to any agent in campaign Y last week. The result set is sortable by any of the columns, so you can order by Length to find the longest or shortest sessions, or by Start Time to build a chronological audit trail.

How a monitoring session flows

sequenceDiagram
  participant M as Manager
  participant RT as Real-Time Report
  participant A as Agent Channel
  participant Log as Monitoring Log
  M->>RT: Open real-time report
  M->>RT: Click monitor on agent row
  RT->>A: Bridge manager phone into [[channel]]
  RT->>Log: Write START_TIME, manager, agent, status, lead_id
  A-->>M: Audio stream begins
  M->>RT: Stop monitoring
  RT->>Log: Write END_TIME, LENGTH, TYPE

Practical uses

The most common reason to pull this report is a compliance review — confirming that quality-assurance managers are covering the required number of sessions per agent per week, or that a specific call was actually monitored as claimed. A second use is the inverse: spotting a manager who monitored an agent an unusually large number of times in a short window, which may indicate either a performance issue being tracked or an unauthorized access pattern worth investigating.

Because the log records the agent's status at the moment monitoring started, you can also cross-reference it with Call recording data. If the Lead ID column shows a real contact ID, there is almost certainly a recording of that call you can pull alongside the monitoring record.

For the broader picture of what server-level and user-level reporting VICIdial gives you, the server health and capacity guide is a good starting point. For understanding what the agent access side looks like by user group, see what the User Group Login Report tells you about agent access.

If you want this kind of visibility on a managed box where the logging is already configured for you, see what a VICIfast managed server costs — provisioned in under 40 seconds with reporting active from the first boot.