If you use Apple’s built-in VPN and rely on the VPN menu bar item, you might have noticed that that in Mavericks the menu item no longer shows the connection time by default.
That can lead people to believe the VPN connection has not been established, or for users to forget they are connected. It’s quite easy to turn the feature back on: just select “Show Time Connected” from the VPN menu item.
If you want to manage this for your users, the preference is stored in the “com.apple.networkConnect” domain as a boolean value under “VPNShowTime”:
% defaults read com.apple.networkConnect
{
VPNShowTime = 1;
}
You could almost certainly set this with MCX or a configuration profile.
Managing OS X 
Great, as always, thanks for posting this. I was going to report the feature as either broken or missing in Apple Bugreports. I can’t seem to find com.apple.networkConnect though. Can you please share the path of the file?
I’m not going to give you the answer you want, but I am going to give you the answer you need. You should not be modifying preference files directly, especially in Mavericks.
Use MCX, a configuration profile, or the defaults command:
defaults write com.apple.networkConnect VPNShowTime -bool TRUE
Did it, however, I may have uncovered a bug in Mavericks Profile Manager. Check out how the MCX setting looks: https://sesp.box.com/s/bokv9cm9qgr2pns5y0zk
And just to show that I did set it up correctly in Profile Manager: https://sesp.box.com/s/ul9klf3j4c4zpkbdxt9b
Looks as expected to me. What do you think is a bug?
The option isn’t showing up as it was set to be in Profile Manager: https://sesp.box.com/s/0yzkzh1dlvfuc8kpxl9b
Additionally, the formatting of the actual Profile in Settings looks incorrect, specifically the curly brackets.
No, that’s all normal. See the output of `defaults` for comparison.
Just click “show time connected” on the VPN connection menu.