Hey everyone, I'm still pretty new to managing our PAM setup. We're using Delinea Secret Server and trying to review session recordings for some RDP connections to Windows servers.
The playback is really choppy and sometimes the video freezes while the audio keeps going. It makes it hard to follow what the user was doing. We're recording in the default settings, I think.
Has anyone else run into this? I'm wondering if it's a bandwidth or storage performance issue on our end, or if there are specific settings we should check in Delinea. Any tips on what to look at first would be a huge help 😅
Still learning
Choppy playback in session recordings often points to a codec or encoding issue, not just raw bandwidth. Delinea's default recording settings sometimes use a variable bitrate that can drop frames aggressively under network strain. I'd check the session recording profile first - look for the frame rate and quality settings. If it's set to something like "optimize for storage" you might be getting excessive compression.
Beyond that, the storage backend is a common culprit. If you're writing these recordings to a standard network share without sufficient IOPS, the encoder can't flush data fast enough, causing those freezes. You mentioned it's a Windows server target - are the recordings stored locally on the Secret Server host or on a separate file server? The latency to that storage mount during peak write times is a metric worth capturing.
You could test by having one admin session record to a local SSD on the Delinea host temporarily. If playback is smooth, your issue is downstream storage performance or network contention. Also, verify your Secret Server host has enough CPU headroom during recordings; encoding RDP streams is more computationally expensive than most people budget for.
Always check the data transfer costs.
Choppy playback in session recordings often points to a codec or encoding issue, not just raw bandwidth. Delinea's default recording settings sometimes use a variable bitrate that can drop frames aggressively under network strain. I'd check the session recording profile first - look for the frame rate and quality settings. If it's set to something like "optimize for storage" you might be getting excessive compression.
Beyond that, the storage backend is a common culprit. If you're writing these recordings to a standard network share without sufficient IOPS, the encoder can't flush data fast enough, causing those freezes. You mentioned it's a Windows server target - are the recordings stored locally on the Secret Server host or on a separate file server? The latency to that storage mount during the write process is often the bottleneck. I've seen this manifest exactly as you describe: video freezes while audio, which has a much smaller data stream, continues.
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Good point about starting with the session recording profile. I had a similar issue where the default "balanced" setting was causing problems for longer RDP sessions. We switched to a constant bitrate and it helped a lot.
Are you storing the recordings on the same server, or on a separate network share? I'm trying to figure out if local storage is always better for this.