Superior session player, loads of performance and usability enhancements with the new SessionStack

Summer season or not, the SessionStack team has been hard at work to deliver on its promise: much richer and easy to use session player, UI and usability optimizations across the entire application as well as installation and health monitoring enhancements for the SessionStack on-premises SessionStack users.

Try out the new SessionStack and let us know what you think.

Read on to get the details:

• Easily search and filter steps in the timeline:

While the SessionStack player’s timeline has been of great value to our customers, we’ve come to realize that it can be quite difficult to browse through, especially if it’s a long user session that you’d like to explore. There are various step types that the player identifies such as window resize, mouse click, error, message, info and so on, and when there are hundreds of them in the timeline, it gets quite challenging to find what you are looking for.

That’s why with this product update we add a filtering mechanism to help you quickly skim through the all the session steps and spot what you need at a glance:

• Quickly spot the session you haven’t watched yet:

The sessions dashboard can be challenging to browse when you have hundreds of recorded user sessions: you don’t know where to start! Now SessionStack marks as watched the recordings you’ve already seen, helping you get a better understanding what’s left to watch. The setting is per user so your activity will not affect the sessions dashboard of your team members.

• Session replay is now times faster:

Until now, the player loaded the user session to be replayed in a single batch which caused larger sessions to take up a lot of time from the initial request for the session to the time it could start playing. For on premises deployments that also meant taking up loads of server resources.

With this release, sessions are being streamed rather than loaded as a single piece. This means that the session replay starts almost immediately when it’s requested. Server resource consumption has also been reduced — now being a constant value rather than linearly increasing with the size of the session played.

• Adding new team members is quick and smooth

We made it much easier for you to invite collaborators to join your various websites in SessionStack. When you add new team members, an email invitation will be sent to them. Once they open up a SessionStack account, they will be automatically added as collaborators for the given websites. As easy as that.

• Jump between screens and websites

Now it’s much easier to jump from one website to another without having to go to the home view each time. Easily get to the top documentation articles from the newly-introduced Getting started section at the bottom of the home view. The sidebar navigation will be collapsible to help you expand your workspace. We’ve also enhanced the app UI overall to make it more visually pleasing.

We also introduced a couple of new features to help users who chose to deploy SessionStack locally to take a better advantage of the tool:

• Health check for on-premises deployments:

Those of you who are running SessionStack in your own environment can now ensure the tool is properly monitored. SessionStack now provides an API endpoint which when called returns information on the status of all the SessionStack services and its dependencies such as database, message queue and so on. Combined with the monitoring solutions you’ve been already using, it will show you the current status in an easier to digest way and will also notify you if there’s a problem with any of the SessionStack services.

• Effortless on-premises deployment with Dockers

For those of you planning to install SessionStack locally, we have simplified the process big time! You no longer need to go through installing dependency packages, databases, message queue, webserver, running commands, doing configurations for this particular deployment and finally start the services.

We now provide Docker images for on-premises deployment. All you need to do is install Docker, do a couple of configurations and run a single command. And you are done!

Excited about the new features? Go give SessionStack a try.