Mechanisms are provided for performing centralized monitoring of application sessions across a distributed computing environment comprising a plurality of application servers. A request to perform an application session monitoring operation to monitor at least one of input or output streams of application sessions associated with a specified user account identifier is received. A plurality of application instances upon which to perform the requested application session monitoring operation are identified. An application session monitoring request is transmitted to a plurality of session control clients associated with the application instances on a plurality of application servers of the distributed computing environment. The application session monitoring request causes each session control client to monitor at least one of an input or an output stream of application sessions of application instances that are associated with the specified user account identifier, and report results of the monitoring back to the data processing system.