Live Sessions & Sharing

Britive Bridge lets a running session be watched live - over-the-shoulder, in the browser, with no client install. There are two ways someone comes to watch a session:

• Owner sharing - the person running a session creates a view-only link and hands it to a colleague.
• Oversight - an auditor or administrator watches (and optionally controls) sessions within their scope, without needing a link.

Which sessions can be watched?

Only the visual and terminal protocols render a live view: SSH, Telnet, RDP, VNC, and Kubernetes exec. Database sessions (MySQL, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, …) have no screen to watch, so they cannot be shared or watched live - their activity is captured as a queryable command/operations log for after-the-fact review instead.

Owner sharing

A session owner can share their own live session from either place the session is visible:

• the picker - expand the checkout row to its Active sessions list; each active session has a Share button;
• the in-browser session toolbar - the Share button next to Disconnect.

Both act on the same session and stay in sync, so a link created in one place is reflected in the other.

Creating and revoking a link

The control is a toggle:

1. Share mints a view-only watch link for the session and copies it to your clipboard. Hand that link to whoever should watch. The button switches to Unshare.
2. Unshare revokes every link for the session and immediately ends any live viewing in progress. The button switches back to Share.

A link is a capability: anyone who holds it (and is signed in - see below) can watch that one session. It is bound to the single session, expires with the checkout, and is revocable at any time with Unshare. Revocation is all-or-nothing - there is no per-recipient link.

What a recipient experiences

1. Opening the link requires sign-in. If the recipient isn’t authenticated, Bridge sends them through the normal Britive login first, then returns them to the watch view - so every viewer is an identified Britive user (each join is audit-logged).
2. The view is read-only. Recipients see the live screen/terminal but have no lock/disconnect controls - those belong to the owner and to oversight roles.
3. When sharing stops, the view ends - with the right message:
   • If the owner unshares (the session is still running), the recipient sees “Sharing Ended - the session owner has stopped sharing this session.”
   • If the session itself ends, the recipient sees “Session Ended.”

Auditor and administrator oversight

Auditors and administrators don’t need a share link - their role grants oversight:

• Auditors watch (and, when their scope allows, control) sessions within a defined audit scope. See the auditor role for how scope is defined.
• Administrators can watch and control any session.

Oversight viewers reach live sessions from the web interface’s session list and, unlike share recipients, may have control affordances - lock/unlock (freeze the user’s input while keeping the screen visible) and force-disconnect - subject to role and scope.

Ending a session

A session can be ended in several ways, and Bridge tells the user who ended it so the message is never misleading:

• The owner ends their own session from the picker’s End button (or the in-browser Disconnect). If the owner closes or disconnects a native client outside the Bridge UI, Bridge also ends that session. Native clients see a neutral “session ended” notice.
• An administrator force-disconnects a session from the oversight view; the user is told an administrator ended it.
• The checkout expires (or is checked in); Bridge reaps the session.

How it relates to recording

Live viewing and session recording are independent: recording captures the session to the recordings volume for later playback regardless of whether anyone watched live. See Recording & redaction for what is captured and which recorded data is redacted.