Digital Sentry

Digital Sentry is a program that can be configured to monitor the activity of your system and perform a series of actions in response.

This application might prove to be of good use if you prevent unauthorized users from accessing or altering your data while you're away from your computer.

The utility lives on your Menu Bar from where you can change its settings according to your needs. In my testing, I configured the application to take a screenshot as soon as someone used my keyboard or mouse. While configuring this profile's settings, I noticed that you can even attach a timestamp to the snapshot and choose the preferred output formats (JPEG, PNG, etc.). The utility worked perfectly and the screenshot was saved to the selected destination folder as soon as I started typing on my keyboard.

Digital Sentry provides you with a wide range of profiles. It can detect if someone is trying to access and alter one of the monitored files and immediately shut down the Mac, take a webcam picture, etc. The "monitoring -> action in response" combinations are numerous.

The one thing I can't figure out (and the developer fails to provide any details on this matter) is how can a user remove actions from monitoring profiles. For example, I created a monitoring profile that takes a screenshot whenever an unauthorized user tries to modify a file from a directory. I was able to add extra actions, but I couldn't remove the old one.

All in all, Digital Sentry is a helpful tool that provides you with plenty of useful features and comes with a reasonable price. Hence, you should give it a try if you want to monitor your system activity while you're away from your Mac.