Setting an Active Time Limit for courses, standalone environments, and events

Use Active Time Limit to restrict how long a student can access their environment across courses, standalone environments, and events. This feature is useful when you want to limit access to a specific number of hours—either to align with licensing constraints or to support flexible training formats.

How to set Active time limits

Enable Active time limit in a policy

1. In the Admin Portal, go to Policies from the left-hand menu.
2. Select an existing policy or create a new one.
3. In the policy settings, enable the Limit Active time toggle.
4. Set the total number of hours (and minutes, if needed) the student should have access for.
   Example: To allow access for 8 hours per day over 3 days, set the Active time limit to 24 hours.

Note: Active time is cumulative. It can be set to more than 24 hours and is counted across multiple sessions.

Apply the policy to a standalone environment

1. When launching a new standalone environment, locate the Policy dropdown.
2. Select the policy with an Active time limit enabled.
3. Launch the environment. The Active time limit will be applied.

Apply the policy to a course

1. Go to the Courses section and select the course you want to update.
2. Navigate to the Configuration tab.
3. From the Policy dropdown, select the policy with an Active time limit enabled.

Apply Active time limit to an event

1. Create or open an existing event.
2. Set the Start and End dates as usual.
3. In the Configuration tab, enable the Limit Active time toggle.
4. Set the number of hours students should have access across the event’s duration.

Tip: This is ideal for flexible multi-day events where students choose which days to attend. Each student can consume their allotted time across the scheduled window.

Note: When using Active time limit in events, environments started automatically via event scheduling (e.g., using Start VMs at start of class hours) will not consume any active time if the user does not enter the workspace. If your event relies on Active time limits to manage access, disable the scheduled starting of VMs to ensure that environments only consume time when students actively start them.

Edit Active time for a specific environment or event seat

1. Go to the Environments list.
2. Click the row action of the environment or seat.
3. Choose Edit Active time.
4. In the modal:
   1. Toggle Active time on or off.
   2. Increase or decrease the remaining hours as needed.
   3. Click Save

Note: Once Active time reaches zero, the student will lose access to their environment. Additional time can be added to allow the student continued access to their environment.

Notes and tips

• You can use Active time limit even if the original course or event wasn’t created with it enabled.
• Editing Active time per environment or seat gives administrators flexibility to accommodate special requests or extensions.
• Combining Active time limit with auto-stop settings (e.g., stopping VMs after inactivity) can optimize resource usage.

Related articles

• Using policies
• Creating and launching an environment
• Creating a course
• Creating an event