More data is not more security. The right monitoring list is short, boring and defensible — and it deliberately leaves whole areas of a person's day completely alone.
Every monitoring tool offers more switches than any office should turn on. Vendors sell capability; your policy decides use. The test for each data type is simple: does it answer the stated work reason, and would you defend collecting it in front of the whole team? This guide sorts the common classes into the two honest piles — the ones that protect work, and the ones that only satisfy curiosity.
Four classes earn their place. Attendance signals — login, logout and idle time — end timing disputes with records. Application use shows whether work tools are actually being used and which licences are wasted. File movement — copies to USB, uploads from work folders — is the data-leak control, the strongest reason most offices monitor at all. Website categories on the office network support security and acceptable-use rules without reading anyone's pages.
Keystroke logging captures passwords and private messages along with everything else — there is no filtered version of it. Reading chat or personal email content crosses from managing work systems into reading a person's private life, even when it happens on an office PC during office hours; the correct rule is that personal accounts should not be used on office PCs, enforced by policy, not by reading them. Webcam and microphone capture have no place in ordinary office monitoring at all.
Before enabling any feature, imagine announcing it in the team meeting: "From Monday, the system will record X." If the sentence sounds reasonable, enable it. If you find yourself wanting to soften or hide it, that is the answer — leave it off. This one test, applied honestly, keeps a monitoring programme defensible for years.
The full walkthrough — setting up employee PC monitoring on the office LAN, live and step by step.
▶ Watch Full VideoOnly in narrow, policy-stated cases — for example verifying work on a specific project system — with staff informed that it happens. Routine screenshot surveillance of everything on screen collects personal content along the way and fails the proportionality test for most offices.
That is a policy and management matter, visible in application and category reports without reading content. Show the pattern, have the conversation, and follow the process in your policy.
Targeted, secret monitoring of one person is the riskiest version of all. If there is a genuine investigation, document the reason, limit it in time and scope, and take local legal advice first — do not improvise it with the general tool.