30 Minute Automatic Log Out Pop Ups with Session Duration

[adamrees]

Question
A common question that many Looker users run into is "Why am I getting a 'You will be logged out in ___ ' pop up every 30 minutes?".

This can be especially confusing when you are an admin and you see that the Session Duration for the instance is set to some value greater than 30 minutes, like 1 day.

Explanation:

We see this popup due to the way Looker Sessions are set up. The value set in the Session Duration section in the Admin -> Sessions page is how long your session will last from the last log in. Once that session has expired, you will see popups every 30 minutes regarding an automated timeout which will allow you to extend your session for another 30 minutes. Just to reiterate a point here, once you select 'Stay Logged in For 30 Minutes' that will just give you another 30 minutes before the next prompting. This won't reset the timer that is specified in the Session Durations section; for the session and timer to be fully reset, the Looker user will need to fully log out and log back in again.

Example:

The Admin -> Sessions section on an instance has Persistent Sessions and Inactivity Logout Disabled, and has Session Duration set to be 1 day.

• A Looker user logs in at 9 am -> Logs out at 5 pm. Since their log in to log out was all within the 24 hours, they will never see the popup
• A Looker user logs in at 9 am -> Does not log out -> the next day they hop on their computer at 9:30 am and see the popup for 'You will be automatically logged out'. If they click 'Stay Logged in for 30 minutes' they will get this popup again every 30 minutes
  • To create a new session, they will need to log out and log back in again

How Can I Fix This?

There are a couple options so that users will not get this prompting so often. 

• Enable Inactivity Logout.
  • Automatically logs out users if they have been inactive on the page for 15 minutes
  • Usually, if a session has stayed active for a full day, a large chunk of that 24 hours the user would had been away from their Looker application.
  • This will automatically log you out and reduces the chance that you have a 1 day+ session
• Enable Persistent Sessions 
  • Allows users to select 'Stay Logged In' when they first log in to Looker
  • This will keep their session open for 30 days on trusted devices