Before you begin
- A Professional plan or higher. On a lower plan TimeVault shows a locked state that reads "TimeVault™ requires a Professional license."
- The timevault.view permission to open TimeVault. Administrators, operators and auditors have it by default.
- timevault.compare to compare snapshots and timevault.export to export them (see Permissions below)
Open TimeVault
In the sidebar, open Atlas Compass → TimeVault™. It opens on the Timeline tab. Under the Historical Infrastructure Intelligence heading, four tabs take you to the Dashboard, Snapshots, Compare and Timeline. The Compare tab only appears if you have the timevault.compare permission.
How snapshots are captured
- Hourly: Atlas captures a snapshot of every entitled tenant once an hour. The first one runs about 20 minutes after the app starts, so a new deployment shows no snapshots until then.
- Daily baseline: once a day, at midnight UTC, Atlas also captures a snapshot labeled Daily baseline. Daily baselines are kept indefinitely and give long-range comparisons a stable reference point.
- On demand: click Capture Snapshot, beside the TimeVault™ title on the Dashboard or Snapshots tab, to take one straight away, for example just before a change. This needs the timevault.admin permission.
- Retention: ordinary snapshots are kept for the period shown on the Dashboard (90 days by default) and then deleted. Daily baselines and the snapshot you set as your baseline are exempt.
Capture a snapshot right before a planned change, such as an image swap or a scaling plan edit, and another right after. Comparing the two gives you an exact record of what the change did.
The Dashboard
The Dashboard tab shows the health of your snapshot history at a glance:
- Total Snapshots: how many snapshots are stored, and since when.
- Changes Today: how many snapshots have been captured today.
- 24h Heartbeat: how many snapshots were captured in the last 24 hours. Red bars mark any hour with no snapshot, which usually means the app was stopped or a capture failed.
- Storage Used: how much space your snapshots take up.
- Retention Period: how long ordinary snapshots are kept.
Below the cards, the Dashboard lists the most recent snapshots with their source, host pools, hosts, sessions and compliance score, and shows which snapshot is your baseline. Quick Navigation links take you to the other tabs.
Browse snapshots
The Snapshots tab lists every stored snapshot with when it was captured, its label, its size and how many pools and hosts it recorded. A star marks the baseline. Search by label or snapshot ID, filter by source (Scheduler, Manual or Deploy event) and by date (Last 24h, Last 7 days, Last 30 days or All time). Click View to open a snapshot.
Inside a snapshot
A snapshot opens as a historical record, not live data. The Overview shows its headline numbers: host pools, session hosts, active sessions, open alerts, month-to-date cost, compliance score, scaling plans and role assignments. The other tabs show the captured Host Pools, Session Hosts, Scaling Plans, Active Sessions, Configuration and RBAC Assignments in detail.
If some data could not be read when a snapshot was captured, the snapshot is marked Incomplete snapshot and names the missing areas. Role assignment principals are only shown to users with timevault.compare or timevault.export.
Snapshot actions
- Export: downloads the snapshot as a CSV file. Needs timevault.export.
- Set as Baseline: makes this snapshot the reference point Compare starts from, and keeps it out of the retention sweep. Only one snapshot is your baseline at a time, so setting a new one replaces the previous one. Daily baselines are not affected. Needs timevault.admin.
- Delete: permanently deletes the snapshot and everything it captured. This cannot be undone. Needs timevault.admin.
Compare two snapshots
- Open the Compare tab.
- Under From (baseline), pick the earlier snapshot. Under To (compare target), pick the later one.
- Atlas lists every difference in the Changes table, with the Total Changes count and a count of what was Added, Removed and Modified.
Read the comparison
Changes cover Host Pools, Session Hosts, Scaling Plans, Sessions, Configuration, Cost, Alerts, RBAC and Compliance. Each change is marked Warning (for example a session host that was removed, stopped accepting new sessions or became unavailable) or Info. Filter by severity, search the changes, or click View Diff on a row to see the before and after values side by side. If the two snapshots are identical, Compare shows No differences detected.
Export Diff downloads the whole comparison as CSV or PDF, and Export selected exports only the rows you tick. Both need timevault.export as well as timevault.compare. If one of the snapshots is incomplete, Compare warns that some areas were not compared.
The Infrastructure Timeline
The Timeline tab shows everything that happened in your environment as events on a timeline: VM deployments, scale events, script runs, maintenance, image changes, errors, and user activity such as sign-ins, sign-outs and disconnects. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom and click any event for details. Pick a time range from the last hour to the last 30 days, filter by event category, and turn on live mode to see new events as they arrive.
The Timeline also needs the operations.timeline.view permission, and exporting it needs operations.timeline.export.
Permissions
- timevault.view: open TimeVault, browse snapshots and view the Dashboard. Administrators, operators and auditors have it by default.
- timevault.compare: open the Compare tab and compare snapshots. Administrators and operators have it by default.
- timevault.export: export snapshots and comparisons. Administrators and auditors have it by default.
- timevault.admin: capture snapshots on demand, set the baseline and delete snapshots. Administrators only.
- operations.timeline.view: view the Infrastructure Timeline.
Common uses
- Troubleshooting: users report slow logons since this morning. Compare a snapshot from yesterday with one from today and look for a changed VM size, a session host that stopped accepting new sessions, a new scaling plan schedule or changed RDP properties. Then check the Timeline for what happened around that time.
- Change verification: capture a snapshot before and after a planned change, and keep the comparison as a record of exactly what changed.
- Audit evidence: give auditors a dated, read-only record of your environment, role assignments and compliance score at a point in time. Export the snapshot or the comparison, and use Exporting Reports to run any report against a historical snapshot.