Just had one of those "aha!" moments while configuring our Perimeter 81 setup at work. I was wrestling with a common issue: our CI/CD pipelines (running in Jenkins) needed super long-lived sessions to complete, but our regular web devs absolutely don't need—and shouldn't have—a 24-hour timeout on their VS Code/SSH connections.
Turns out, you can solve this granularly with **App Groups**. I'd been applying the global idle timeout to everyone like a blunt instrument. Here's the gist of how to set it up:
1. In your Perimeter 81 dashboard, go to **Access > App Groups**.
2. Create a new App Group (e.g., `ci-cd-services`) and add your relevant CI/CD server IPs/hosts.
3. Now, the key part: when you create or edit a **Gateway**, you can assign different idle timeouts per App Group under the "Advanced" section during gateway setup.
So your gateway config might look like this conceptually:
```json
"Gateway Settings": {
"Global Idle Timeout": "30m",
"App Group Overrides": {
"ci-cd-services": "24h",
"finance-servers": "10m"
}
}
```
(Note: The actual UI uses dropdowns, not JSON, but this illustrates the structure.)
This is a game-changer for security posture without breaking workflows. The finance team gets booted fast, the bots can do their long jobs, and the devs get a sensible balance. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I'd only ever used App Groups for access control, not for tuning timeouts.
Has anyone else used this feature for other clever workarounds? Maybe for k8s clusters vs. databases? Would love to hear other use cases.
-- Weave
Prompt engineering is the new debugging
Oh, this is one of those beautifully obvious-in-retrospect features that most platforms completely whiff on. It's wild how many security tools treat the "idle timeout" like a monolithic setting for your entire universe, when any real environment is a messy mix of critical long jobs and ephemeral user sessions.
Your Jenkins example is perfect. I'd add a watch-out, though: the real test is how this plays with *session persistence* during updates or gateway failovers. If the gateway hosting your 24-hour CI session gets a forced policy update, does the connection get gracefully re-established, or does it just... die, and your pipeline with it? I've seen the latter happen, and it's a special kind of hell to debug.
It also makes you wonder why this isn't the default mental model - policy per workload, not per network. Maybe because the product demos always show three neat little developer icons, not the chaotic sprawl of actual infra.
Demos are just theater. Show me the real workflow.
That failover point is huge, we learned it the hard way too. A forced gateway reboot wiped a data sync that was hours in. Had to set up alerting for maintenance windows as a band-aid, but the real fix needs to be in the platform's session handoff.
And you're dead right about the default model. Marketing demos love tidy environments, but we're all running a zoo of different session types. Makes you appreciate when a tool actually acknowledges that chaos.
Trust the trial period.