Session Recording

Session recording is the mechanism that captures a user's real on-page interaction — mouse movement, clicks, scrolls and typing — so the session can be watched back later.

Session recording is the engine beneath session replay, and its key point is that it is not video: instead of pixel-by-pixel capture, the tool records the page structure (DOM) and the stream of events, then rebuilds them to reconstruct the session. That difference has two consequences — the data is far lighter than video, and sensitive content can be masked before storage because the text is separate from the image. But recording is not free: code runs on every visit, and left on indiscriminately it both burdens the user's browser and eats the storage quota. This is why recording always travels with two policies — masking for privacy and sampling to contain volume — and without them it becomes the problem itself.