Feature Request: Allow Configurable Session Timeout for Wallboard / Kiosk Use Cases
Hi!
Running version 1.3.3, bare metal installation.
First of all, I just want to say thank you for building PatchMon. I’ve been testing it in my homelab, and I really like the direction you are taking with the product. The UI, the overall concept, and how lightweight the agents are — it’s a great tool and already becoming part of my daily setup. Kudos to you and the team for putting this together!
And, least, I got all my servers up to date!
I noticed the new SESSION_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT_MINUTES setting and tried increasing it to 2880 minutes (48 hours). This does help, but I wanted to share my use case and see if we could improve this area a bit further. I also did read https://github.com/PatchMon/PatchMon/issues/232 . Is there a max?
Use Case
I’ve created a dedicated “wallboard” user, and the goal is to keep the PatchMon dashboard running on a monitor in my homelab to keep an eye on system status at all times. For this scenario, it’s not ideal for the session to time out, as it requires manual sign-in to bring the dashboard back.
I understand the security side of session management, but for a trusted local environment and a read-only wallboard display, a different timeout behavior would be really helpful.
Feature Request
Would it be possible to support one of the following (any would solve the issue):
- Allow a “no timeout” value
- Example: setting timeout to 0 disables inactivity logout.
-Add a “wallboard/kiosk mode”
- Example: setting timeout to 0 disables inactivity logout.
- -A mode intended for read-only dashboards, where sessions are allowed to stay active for a long period.
-(Future consideration) Session policy per user/role would also solve it, if RBAC expands later.
Why This Helps
PatchMon is a great fit for running on a wallboard or dashboard screen for continuous visibility. Being forced to re-authenticate periodically breaks that experience, especially for non-interactive users.
Even a simple “opt-in” setting for trusted environments would help a lot.
Happy to test anything or provide more details if needed.
Thanks again for the great work — really enjoying PatchMon so far!
3 Comments
Hey, I totally agree. We internally have NOC boards and having a dashboard that almost rotates with showing information on hosts that are favorites etc would be really useful.
This is also on the roadmap, and I have a personal reason to build this too.
I feel like having multiple dashboards as well as a dashboard that can be accessed with a one-time guest link (for lets say clients) etc. I really want to build all this in.
What do you think, does that align with what you're suggesting as well.
Hi @9technologygroup , that sounds like spot on to me. Either the suggested link (can be hard to enter via a dashboard?) or that you whitelist logon from i.e. a IP entered from admin interface. But yes, running dashboards like Pulse, Uptime Kuma, Grafana and now PatchMon with tab switcher in fullscreen is where I want to be, so our thoughts do align. Either build them via the tool, or take the ideas from https://docs.teslamate.org/docs/screenshots that embedded Grafana, either or, looking forward to your ideas here.
Hey, I totally agree. We internally have NOC boards and having a dashboard that almost rotates with showing information on hosts that are favorites etc would be really useful.
This is also on the roadmap, and I have a personal reason to build this too.
I feel like having multiple dashboards as well as a dashboard that can be accessed with a one-time guest link (for lets say clients) etc. I really want to build all this in.
What do you think, does that align with what you're suggesting as well.
Session timeouts can be configured in environment variables now.