You can create a Agent Scheduled rule to detect idle time. To do so:
1. Click the BEHAVIOR > Policies. This will open the Behavior Policies screen:
2. Click the ADD RULE FOR THIS POLICY button under a policy where you want to add this rule. This will open the Rule Editor:
3. On the left side of the screen, click the General tab.
4. Give the rule a name.
5. Select Agent schedule from the Rule Category section.
6. Click the CONTINUE This will take you to the User tab:
7. Enter users/departments in the APPLY RULE TO field.
8. Optionally, you can exclude users by selecting them in the EXCLUDE FROM RULE. For example, if you want to apply the rule to a department except for a few users, this option would be handy.
9. Optionally, you can turn on the INHERIT POLICY SETTINGS toggle. This will use the user settings from the policy itself. Check out the Behavior > Policies section in the User Guide to learn more about policies.
10. Click the CONTINUE button. This will take you to the Schedule tab:
11. From the SELECT TYPE OF SCHEDULE VIOLATION menu, select the Idle option.
12. In the DEFINE THE TIME RANGE field, specify the idle time in minutes.
13. Optionally you can set off-hours/breaks under SETUP OFF-HOURS. Click the small - or + buttons and then drag the sliders to set up off-hours. The rule will not be applied during these off-hours.
14. Click the CONTINUE button. This will take you to the Actions tab:
15. Select an action and specify the action parameters. For example, you can use the NOTIFY action to alert the HR personnel about the user’s idle time. Check out the Defining Rule Actions section in the Rules Guide to learn more about rule actions.
16. Click the SAVE & LAUNCH RULE button.
An idle time rule will trigger independently of the idle time threshold (Monitoring Settings > Applications > IDLE TIME THRESHOLD (MINUTES). The idle time threshold affects when idle time starts to be tracked but an idle rule can trigger sooner than that threshold. As an example, suppose an employee is logged into Windows and the desktop is NOT locked for an hour total. If the employee stops moving the mouse right away or using the keyboard but the desktop does NOT get locked, then the idle time starts to be tracked after 10 minutes (the idle time threshold). So that would be about 50 minutes total of idle time tracked, and 60 minutes of total worked time (since the desktop wasn't locked).
An idle rule has nothing to do with how worked time is tracked though. All it does is perform the action if the employee is idle over the number of minutes set in the rule. For example, if a rule is set to email a manager if an employee is 30> minutes idle, then the rule would trigger and send an email after 31 minutes of being idle (# of minutes in the rule + 1), regardless of what the idle time threshold is set to.