---
title: Sessions
sidebar:
  label: Overview
description: Record how AI tools are actually used, by whom, and what it costs.
---

Finding AI tools tells you what is installed. **Sessions** tell you how those tools are used. A session is one conversation between a person and an AI tool: a chat in ChatGPT, or a task given to Claude Code.

Recording is **off** until you turn it on, one tool at a time, under [Prompt collectors](/surface/extensions/endpoint/prompt-collectors/overview).

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  subgraph laptop["On the laptop"]
    CC[Claude Code, Codex] -->|session files| SC[Scanner]
    BR[ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini,<br/>Perplexity in Chrome] -->|browser extension| SC
  end
  SC -->|sessions| CO[Console]
  CO --> S1[Sessions page]
  CO --> S2[AI Usage dashboard]
```

## What is recorded

For each session: the tool, the AI provider and model, the person and laptop, every message with its text, token counts (the small chunks of text AI providers charge by), the tools the AI called, and an estimated cost.

The message text is kept one step away from everything else. Reading it takes an extra confirmation and is written to the audit log. See [Review sessions](/surface/sessions/review).

## Where it is stored

Sessions stay in SuperAlign storage for **30 days**. If you connect your own [Amazon S3](/surface/extensions/cloud/s3) or [Splunk](/surface/extensions/cloud/splunk), the data lives in your system under your own retention rules.

## Who can see sessions

Owners, Admins, and Viewers see all sessions. Members see only sessions from their own laptop.

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Turn on recording" href="/surface/extensions/endpoint/prompt-collectors/overview" icon="toggle-right">
    Choose which tools to record.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Review sessions" href="/surface/sessions/review" icon="list">
    Search, open a trace, read a transcript.
  </Card>
  <Card title="AI usage" href="/surface/sessions/ai-usage" icon="bar-chart">
    Cost, tokens, and top adopters.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>