🚀 Tip
When we say "impersonate", we are referring to the ability to see and do what another person can see and do.
There are actually three different variants of this within Planhat:
A Planhat staff member (also called a "Super Admin"), typically a member of the the Planhat Support team, can request the temporary ability to impersonate you (a Planhat User) in your Planhat tenant
This is the focus of this article
You (a Planhat User with the necessary permission - typically a User with the "Administrator" Role) can impersonate another User within your Planhat tenant
You can read about this in our separate article here
You (a Planhat User) can impersonate External Users, which are End Users (your customers/prospects) that have been added to Portals
You can learn more about this in our Portal FAQs article here
An introduction
What is it?
The "Impersonate User" feature is a tool that can help the Planhat Support team to resolve any complex technical issues you might experience. It allows Planhat staff members ("Super Admins") to essentially "log in" to a Planhat User's account, without sharing any password. The User (you or your colleague) will grant access to be impersonated, and can easily and swiftly revoke access (see step-by-step guide below). The impersonator (Planhat staff member) can freely move around the account (your Planhat tenant, as you) during the session.
What is it used for?
This feature helps us (Planhat) offer fast and high-quality technical support to our customers. By allowing our team to impersonate Users and effectively "see what they see", it is easier to troubleshoot and therefore reduce time-to-resolution. This is a last resort if other problem-solving options have been exhausted (e.g. describing the situation and providing screenshots, etc.).
This feature can also be useful for other Planhat staff members (e.g. CSMs or TAMs) to investigate technical reports, or to demo to you without showing functionality only available to Planhat staff ("Super Admins").
How is security ensured?
As a User, if you want to allow Planhat staff ("Super Admins") to be able to temporarily "impersonate" you (log in as you), you manually initiate this - see below for how. From that point, Planhat staff have a 24-hour window to start their impersonation session - if they wait longer than that, you (the User) would need to enable it again
The User impersonation session then lasts for 24 hours from when the Planhat staff member starts the impersonation. If not manually ended by you as the User (next point), the Planhat staff member would be automatically logged out at 24 hours if they were still logged in
You can at any point (e.g. when the issue being investigated has been resolved) "disallow" (stop) the impersonation session
Additional notes
You, as the User, can still freely use your Planhat account while the impersonation feature is active (i.e. regardless of whether there is also a Planhat staff member logged in as you)
It's possible for the Planhat staff member doing the impersonating to log out and log back in again (multiple times), while the impersonation window (24 hours) is active, although this is not typically recommended
Multiple Planhat staff members could theoretically log in at the same time as the one User, but it's not recommended. If one person impersonating logs out, it would log out any others impersonating that User
It's recommended (but not obligatory) for the Planhat staff member to do the impersonation in an incognito window or second browser
Practical step-by-step guide
If you'd like to allow Planhat staff to begin an impersonation session - e.g. if this has been requested by the Planhat Support team - just follow the simple steps below.
Go to your User Profile, by clicking on your name in the top right of your Planhat tenant, and selecting "Profile"
Click on the ellipsis symbol in the top right, and click "Allow to Impersonate"
You will see the following message pop up - click "Confirm"
If you would like to manually stop the impersonation session, go back to the same place in Planhat and click "Disallow to Impersonate"
