I’m not sure how you would go about this, but that’s for me to request, and you to engineer.
Since we have given people “the power” to patch their own servers, we have a fair amount of users in the console now and that has begun to slow down our database server/everyones consoles. It would be nice to be able to…
Automatically kick users out of the console if they have been idle for X minutes
See who is idle, and manually kick them out
Now, I know we are talking about a connection between a machine and the database mainly and so you would have to somehow close their console. Not sure if it would be a piece of the bigfix agent on the machine that has the console or whatever…
You are correct that the BES Console connections are direct database connections. This brings up an interesting point that the information you are looking for is actually available in SQL Server for you to see.
You can accomplish #2 above by doing the following:
Open SQL Server Enterprise Manager and connect to the BES database.
Look under “Management > Current Activity > Process Info”.
There will be lots of columns, but you can see “user”, “Application”, and “Login Time”. All these will help you pick out the BES Consoles that have been logged in for a long time.
You have the option of right-clicking to “kill process”.
I know this doesn’t meet the full spirit of your request because it is not automatic and it doesn’t really tell you who is “idle”, but it at least can give you a start.
Also, turning down your consoles refresh rate can help a lot (File–>Preferences) and you can enforce a minimum console refresh rate in the BES Admin utility.